Dragon(s)layer
by HospitallerInaBoat
Summary: Man falls from sky, all dragonesses beware. #3 of PORTALJUMPER ORIGINS. AU (M!Human x F!Spyro(Spyra) x F!Cynder x F!Guardians x F!Malefor(Malefora) x F!DragonOCs) (PJ)
1. Prologue

_**Expect harsh language, interspecies smex, blood, gore, dismemberment and the like. The beginning chapters of this story aren't written as well as I would wish, but I can't dedicate the time to rewriting them, as with so many of my stories (though more infrequently as of late, which is good) -my quality goes up as the chapters stack. It's just how my mind works, go figure right?**_

_**Uncensored cover images on my art feeds, DA and FA**_

_**Dragons in this story start as feral, but will not all will remain so**_

_**Support me on P treon so you can keep getting art and stories**_

_**If you choose to utilize the listed soundtracks, I recommend playing them on loop until the next paragraph break and on low background volume, soundtracks listed often go outside the range of the brand the current fanfiction is written about **_

_**My Discord Room, The Plunger Club, is open to anybody who isn't a turd, doesn't troll others, and respects the two or three simple rules I have pinned at the top**_

_**If you submit feedback using the Guest Review system, I cannot directly respond to you and I never use chapter-top notes to address responses to anyone**_

_**And one last thing: if you're a Trump supporter, you're going to hell ;) **_

_**This is part of my Portaljumper Multiverse series, which means it shares a crossover universe with most of my other Fanfictions, so if you're confused, consult my bio**_

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**Dragon(s)layer**

**🐉 [Prologue] 🐉**

**Start with a Night Terror**

* * *

_**"Dragons: Beings of scale, solitude and pride. Armored exteriors... velvet insides."**_

* * *

**(*)**

_**Do we seek faith in darker lands**_

_**Where fathers slay sons with eager hands**_

_**From the north should be a golden glow**_

_**To drive back the howling winds and snow**_

_**Might we pray to gods who are dead**_

_**And forget the precedents in our founders' stead**_

_**We are stone, faced with fire**_

_**Weakened by the west with every pyre**_

_**We have seen those beneath hills so steep**_

_**Forever stricken with the secrets they keep**_

_**Upon fallen shores do we thrive**_

_**Relying on treachery to survive**_

_**Do not mourn us and weep**_

_**For we are peaceful in eternal sleep**_

**(*)**

**\- Darkseep Tome, Verse of Stormwatch, Page 355**

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_**{Legend of Spyro Movie Soundtrack: Prelude to a Dream}**_

* * *

The first thing she felt was the sensation of falling, which was strange for a creature born with the ability to fly. Her wings would not open to save her life.

No matter how hard she tried, she could not get them to work. They were frozen over with ice that she could not see. Her eyes were veiled in a blanket of darkness that she could not feel. She was gripped by a sense of panic, and she didn't know where that emotion, or any of these crippling hindrances had come from. Twisting, looping, with lead in her guts.

Her legs were passing her hipline as she swirled from one end to the other, tumbling with such high velocity that each time she spun, the wind would whip her opposite half to fruition threatening to tear her spine in two.

_Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh._ End over end.

Ass over teakettle.

Her mother had said that once, when she had burned her claw on a hot-stone meant for cooking her dinner, and she had tumbled away across the kitchen floor. She was the only one in the village who needed to cook her meals to eat them. Those memories were chilling in the back of her mind even now.

She was beginning to wonder if she had hit the earth already and just hadn't felt it. But then, she understood that there was no nausea to go with her flipping and turning.

Not even a dragoness of her stature could withstand this much of a merry-go-round and not toss their cookies. And that was saying something, because her ego _rarely_ let logic overtake her own hedonistic fat-headedness.

She was endlessly falling and wasn't physically being gripped by the sensation of it.

That had to mean it was a dream.

_That actually makes a whole lotta' sense._

Suddenly, right as she began to fight against the wind tearing at the edges of her mouth, and she was beginning to make a big, toothy grin, the earth started to materialize below her. It was gray, and immense, and very, very _real._

She cursed. She cursed so loudly that even the howl of the air vortex couldn't steal the word from her, and a very choice word at that.

Down and down she went, until, bathed in hellfire, casting a terrible glow through the night sky, the reptile's feet streamed behind her. She angled for the ground head-first, crying out in defiance as death lifted to claim her.

She was a fireball. Unceasing, and a bronze meteor penetrating the dusk heavens. She broke clouds. She broke the air itself, and then, she kissed the earth, and everything was lost in a deafening explosion, and a phantasmal sheet of pure white…

**-_Crash~!_**

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{🐉}


	2. Chapter 1 - Night Fighter

**Dragon(s)layer**

**1**

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**Night Fighter**

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Spyra awoke with a gasp. The nesting crinkled underneath her as she sat up.

Her purple eyes were wide, and they glinted like silver platters in the dark, darting to find the source of the disturbance that had torn her from the nightmare.

_Right on cue too,_ the dragon recalled as she panted, gripped by a cold sweat. Her body was a regal navy blue in the dim illumination of the burrow, and it flowed like liquid sapphire as she uncurled from the hays and fronds bundled underneath her golden tummy.

She was shivering so hard that her fangs were chattering. Spyra shook herself, trying to cast off the tremors like they were some kind of residue clinging to her, but it did little to solve the problem, and so, standing in her nest, her one-dragon earthquake kept itself up, rattling her for all she was worth.

_What was that?_

She didn't know if her question was about the dream or the crash that had ended it.

_It must have been bad Salamander steak._

Spyra subconsciously licked her chops and swept her gaze around. It was the dead of night, and the fronds blanketing the thicket roof were pattering lightly and consistently.

**_Crash~! _**–came from outside again. A duplicate of her dream-killer's cry.

_Thunder. Rain and thunder._

Spyra deflated in her nest, chuckling coldly under her breath as she buried her snout in her paws and sighed with exhaustion. She could feel the bags developing under her eyes and the dull throb inside her skull. It made her want to yank her horns.

It was the same thing as always, just with a little bit of spice.

God damned insomnia.

At least the storm was kind enough to show itself _tonight_ of all nights. Normally, she had to wait for her brother or her parents to come in and wake her during the nightmares.

_What a trip._

Spyra's nostrils gave off a bit of soot as she snorted. A yawn did little to bring back her desire for sleep, and so, licking her dry fangs again, she whipped her tail and stood up.

_No use now._

Itching her flank provided a doggish kick from her rear paw that made her giggle. She stepped out of her nest and padded across the room, dismissively palming stray bits of hay from her forelegs.

**_Crash~! _**–went the storm outside again, rumbling the earth and shaking the walls of her home. Spyra blinked at the archway to her room whilst she passed outside.

There was no way to tell what time it was with all the clouds overhead. Though the foyer to the family den was as dark as ever to speak of a midnight hour. She silently hoped it wasn't so, for that meant she was in for a long, restless night.

_Again._

She didn't have a good reputation for managing to go back to sleep after a bad dream. It was just never part of her chemistry to grasp it when she lost it. _Springy_, her father had always described it as. Springy or not, the purple beastess had never whittled down her insomnia, and there wasn't a big glimmer of hope anywhere for that to change.

Springy_ couldn't be farther from the truth. It's more like _horrible._ Double-horrible and then some. Annoying as heck, and unhealthily hermit-ish to boot._

Tiny snores emanating from her parents' den told her she at least hadn't disturbed them. She edged her snout past their frame in the lobby and smiled at a small pair of pink and blue lights obscured in their tiny nesting.

Anybody might have asked where her parents were in all of this. But Spyra would be the first to say that she was already looking at them.

Dragonflies. The most influential in all the swamp, too. They were oblivious to her troubles, and she was thankful for that. Two little insects, nestled together in a little bird-bath looking protrusion in the middle of the room.

She tip-clawed out the frame and checked in on her brother's state. His room was smaller, small enough for a mouse. Or maybe a gerbil. She always compared him to rodents, which drove him crazy and usually earned responses such as thrown objects.

Firefly was there, with the leaf-covers up to his chin, like he had done since the day he had grown up from his nymphood in the pond right outside their home. He was a tiny amber light in the darkness, sparkling a little, but never fading.

Sighing, the reptile backed out of the room and stepped to the front of the thicket, watching, as a torrent of rain transformed the earth outside their abode into mud, thankfully barred by the dam of stones bordering the open archway.

Now that she was awake, and with no one to talk to, Spyra's mind began to wander, like it usually did when she was bored, and alone.

_Alone._

Any relief she might've gotten for her constant need to go out and see things was stamped away by the storm.

Trying to alleviate her tiredness, she went through a few workout stretches to finish waking herself up. Her purple legs extended behind her in cat-like quivers, sinewy muscles rippling beneath her purple coat of beautiful scales as she turned the lobby of the thicket-home into a preparation gym.

She spread her wings and twitched them in the cool air, wishing she could give them a flap and lift herself from the dreary interior of her home. Though cowed by it, Spyra stared at the storm outside, even as one of her joints gave off a charismatic _pop~! _behind her.

_Too much rain. Nasty, nasty, wet rain._

She clicked her tongue.

What else was there to do anyhow? She could never sleep after the nightmares and…

…and honestly, she hated being cooped up in her own thicket, nightmare or not.

_I'm gonna' regret this._

* * *

{🐉}

The rain was cold and uncomfortable against her hide. But after the first few torrential waves of water, it started to have a sort of cooling effect on her. The droplets practically sizzled to nothingness when they made contact with her azurely shadowed skin, and that wasn't just because of her fiery internal workings.

_It's always too wet around here._

Spyra squinted through the downpour and spotted on the edge of the swampy property a round hobble of thickets and twisting tree trunks. A faint, ominous and amber-colored glow resonated from inside a warped arch frame made of bramble tangles.

During the day, warriors were always out and about that place, like moths around a lit torch. That was the Shrine of the Mayfly, the holiest site for her parents' tribe. It was where the village elders- led by none other than her own father –would convene to seek prophecies of the coming future. It was also where the dead were interred, and where marriages were proclaimed.

_Marriages, pfft._

The feisty dragon licked rainwater from her chops and stalked into the shrine's front entrance, ridding herself of the rain.

Who needed stuff like that anyhow? It wasn't like there were any suitable applicants for her own claw in this place. She was too mighty, too _regal_ for something like a… a _bug._

_Splat~!_

Spyra growled as her foot presumptuously implanted itself into a mud-pie. She countered by unceremoniously wiping her palm clean on a frond growing from the shrine archway's flank.

Maybe it was just swamp residue in the rainwater getting into her mouth, but Spyra could detect the sour taste on her tongue before she actually recognized it.

_Yes,_ that was her only family she was talking about, but she was a _dragon_, for Ancestors' Sakes! Dragons were the stuff of legend. They were the great Northern City Builders, the Bulwarks against the Darkness! The Epitome!

….At least, that was what she had read in the very limited sources her father and her brother had been able to scrounge up for her.

She supposed it could've all just been propaganda.

But weren't dragons supposed to be above all that?

_I hope dad didn't lock up all the dummies again…_ Spyra shook herself like a soaked canine. Water glistened everywhere as she duplicated the storm outside with a small typhoon of her own. _I need to hit something. That'll wake me up._

The last bit of her to be dried was her golden tail tip. Everyone always said it looked like a _leaf,_ but she liked to think of it as a flame-lick. She glanced at it over her wings as she flicked her fifth limb and sent a globule of rainwater off into some dark corner of the chamber. Her tail tip winked at her in the shadows, metallic, and sculpted, almost as if by some phantasmic artificer's hand.

**_Crash~!_**

The dragon jumped, sneering at the archway to the swamp outside. The rain battered the roof of the Shrine of the Mayfly relentlessly.

There were disadvantages to the cheapness of leaf-frond roofs. What they needed around here was some good limestone or cobble.

Not that the little insect village had the means to procure or create such materials. But then again, she'd never been one for semantics.

Now… where were those dummies?

Spyra turned her attention back to the interior of the shrine thicket. A circular cell awaited her there. It was a decently sized habitation, though, one meant for things much more refined than simple _living space_ for some of the village drones.

Ornately carved pedestals arose from a crack-ridden floor of ancient stone and swept clay. There were six of them, all roughly egg-shaped, and riddled from tip-top to base with almost unreadable scripture in an alphabet Spyra was still struggling to grasp even in her young adulthood.

Dragonfly-script was… complicated to read.

How did one explain that?

It was –(to her at least)- a whole lot of really complex symbols and workarounds that all were invariably meant to center on a simplistic subject.

Such as; the amount of time it took Dragonfly scribes to say something like: _"There was a stone on the ground" –_was enough space in other folks' scrolls to write several _tomes_, and tomes focusing on things much more significant or epic than a bloody rock.

But, who was Spyra to judge?

She hated reading anyway. The scrabbled shit on those pedestal-blocks could've been about the funniest skit she'd ever heard, and still the amount of text made her gorge twitch.

The pedestals were stories, at least, according to her father. Albeit ones she had no desire to know even in the slightest.

Each one of them detailed an age of the village's ancestors and founding. A new one was carved every one hundred years by a whole new generation of scribes. If that crude timeclock could be considered accurate, it meant that her home had been here for six centuries. Six centuries of quiet. Not the place a thrill-seeking dragoness like her belonged.

Spyra grumbled as she stepped over the cracked stone and clay of the shrine's dais. The constant glow of amber from over her head attracted her attention whilst she passed under the temple's tiny ceiling.

For a dragonfly on ground level, it was pretty high up. But for her, all she had to do was stand on her haunches and tap the stonework with her talon.

Ten feet, she reckoned. Up there, made from a kind of quartz crystal that not even her father, the chieftain, could identify, was the brilliantly sculpted sigil of a colossal insect.

The Great Mayfly spanned the entirety of the cracked, vine-strewn dome like some sort of cathedral ornament, or a mosaic detailing but one single slide. The quartz crystal making the hollow-filled mayfly shape glowed like fire due to the ancient magicks flowing through the shrine like lifeblood. It bathed the interior in a ghostly orange, despite there being no fire present. During the day, it was hardly noticeable, but at night…

_Spooky._

Spyra paid heed to the rounded walls of the shrine, studded with tiny slots that she could fit her paw into individually. They were burial shelves. Tiny sarcophagi made out of rootballs and fronds were in many of them. The shrine was but both blades on the theoretical handle.

Here, life was consecrated, as was love, but also death. Every dragonfly to have ever lived here was interred in these walls. When Spyra had been a hatchling, she used to be terrified of coming here, telling her amused father stories of how she would- '_See dancing dragonfly lights in the temple at night.' –_even when the whole village was asleep.

Now, Firefly made fun of her even to this day for her little ghost-stories when she was tiny. But Spyra knew she wasn't one to give in to hysteria.

There _had_ been lights in this shrine, ones not belonging to the quartz mayfly carving high over her head right now. Long ago, had they been very real.

She wondered if they stopped just because she had gotten older. She knew no one would ever believe her, but she'd been exploring this swamp long enough to have seen some crazy shit.

_There you are._

Dummies made out of burlap sacks and sticks. There were only three of them, and they were half her overall size, meant to mimic some of the predatory animals in the swamp, like badgers, or ferrets.

Of course, the description of _predatory_ was from a dragonfly's eye, not a dragon's.

If the real things had shown their mugs, she'd have eaten them.

Little slip-in holes lined the shrine's farthest, southern rim. Three of them, one for each dummy whenever the warriors of her village wanted to train beneath the eyes of their ancestors.

To Spyra, it was all the same. She'd lived a life without an audience, and for some reason, all she had ever wanted was one.

But the dead didn't count. Not even a little bit.

She had to use her teeth almost as much as her claws. The stakes for the dummies were made of this old wood that for some reason tasted like mothballs to her.

What exactly did mothballs taste like? And how did she know that, despite having never eaten one?

Semantics.

The dummy bucked loudly inside the slip-in, its stake grinding against the stone from repeated blows delivered via claw and tail. Spyra grit her fangs and slashed outwards with her purple paws, the front ones first, for offense, any potential backhand parries or surprise hooks needed to come from the rear talons.

_Slash-slash, kick, slash. _Two swipes, a backward jab, followed by a finishing arc. It sounded much more simple than it really was.

The dragoness was lighting fast. She'd always been a tomboy of sorts. She loved adventure, talking about it, dreaming of it, exploring the wilderness in her waking hours.

But most of all, she loved to _fight. _Fighting was just such a release for her, a crux that she could never quite separate her own soul from. It wasn't just something to vent her frustrations on, it was… _poetic,_ almost song-like too, like she was getting out something inside her that no words ever could.

_Slash-slash, spin… punch, kick._

Spyra grinned as she spun like a top, landed perfectly on her slender claws with a tiny _click! _of her talons hitting the cobble, and returned to the dummy for more.

_Let's see you stand up to _that,_ burlap man._

The dummy silently protested its own torture, the burlap of the sack flailing with each hit and tear. Strands of hay were starting to bleed from wounds that were almost as make-believe as they were real.

Spyra only saw the yellow straw, but in reality, she sometimes _wished_ it was the crimson warmth of blood.

"…_Spyra?_"

Spyra's grin was lost with a _yip._

The purple dragoness stumbled on her footing, and she wound up hitting the floor of the shrine, _hard,_ gritting her fangs as she skidded to a halt.

There was a blue, fluorescent shape, floating in midair, cutting off her view from the torrential downpour outside.

"Spyra." The sapphire will-o-wisp said, filling the air with a soft whisper of insectoid wings, as Lightnux, Chieftain of the Dragonfly Village, levitated into the bramble, revealing the details of his exhausted, but concerned, little insect-face. "What in the world are you doing in here?"

Lightnux, Chieftain of the tribe. Her adoptive father for the last nineteen years of her young life. Spyra was ten times his size, and yet…

"D-Dad! I was, uhm… I was-" The dragon glanced once between him and the dummy- which was now behind her –and settled for staring at her own front paws as she fiddled with them. "…_practicing._"

The chieftain's wings fluttered in the dark. His eyes- as blue as the bioluminescence cascading from his tiny body –flickered much as hers did. First to the set-up burlap dummy, then to her.

When Spyra thought he was going to scold her and tell her to go back to bed, he surprised her by chuckling quietly under his breath.

Or, at least as well as his mandibles could let him. Speech was possible, but to her, it always sounded like the dragonflies of her home were talking through bubble-wrap, if that made any sense.

Her father sounded _crinkly_ in the dark. Plastic-ish.

"…I didn't know determination was so funny." Spyra pouted childishly on the floor of the shrine, craning a scaly brow-ridge at the older insect.

"_Nono,_ I am not laughing at you, my daughter." Lightnux shook his little head, floating closer to her, lowering his flight path so that dragon and dragonfly were eye to eye. "I just think _you're_ funny, not your actions."

"Mom always says I'm funny." Spyra glumly remarked. "Did I wake ya' up leaving the thicket? I was pretty quiet..."

"I saw you walk outside into the storm." Lightnux dusted water off his arms as he spoke. "So either you have developed a case of sleepwalking, or something is troubling you."

"What gave you that idea?"

"You always move around when you're troubled. You've done so since you were small." He mandible-grinned.

"Yeah, well... y'know me..." Spyra chuckled. "It isn't a big deal, I just couldn't sleep."

"Is it truly that simple?"

"Yes." She paused, her tail flicking in the monotony. Her eyes stuck back on the dummy. "Totally."

"Spyra," Lightnux held his hands out. "talk with me. What's in your head? Was it another nightmare?"

"...Everyone has nightmares, dad." Spyra lowered her chin and shifted on the floor. "-Okay, _truly,_ I might still be a little peeved about what Firefly's little friends did earlier this morning, you know the two, Whipwing and Spriteleek?"

"Promising young nymphs, them. They have excellent manners whenever Firefly invites them over." Lightnux cheerily said. "Did they want to play with you?"

"They snuck up behind me with a creeper stuck through with a splinter." Spyra crankily creased her chop. "_Pin the tail on the dragon._ They pinned. I torched. It was a rough morning..."

"_Oh._" Lightnux cringed. "Perhaps they could use some work..."

"Yeah. Maybe they could, but I think they learned their lesson..." Spyra clicked her canines together and chanced a spark on the back of her tongue. Fire was certainly liberating when it was giving those who displeased you a fat ole' _smooch._ "Reaction timing is a pain anyhow for them. You know our warriors would never stand a chance if, like, another one of _me_ decided that they didn't like the insect-village soiling their view of the mangroves and puss-shrooms everywhere, and came in claws blazing. Right?"

"That's why we maintain the curfew." The chieftain sighed. "No _dragonflies _past the fringes of the village. For safety! I'd never assumed that law applied to you as well. Not that anyone had much of a choice."

"Aren't I just a sweet little peach~?" Spyra stuck two talons in her cheeks and squished them, giving him a raspberry. "Eh, but peaches are white, and shit... what am I?... I guess... a _plum? _Aren't they related? Mom would know, she could actually ask them."

"Plant speaking isn't as easy as she makes it sound." Lightnux admitted. "It takes years of training, and perfecting techniques."

"Yeah_, _ya' lost me at _years..._" Spyra rebuked, stretching her forepaws as she stood up. "...Who's got time to not be out there and exploring anyhow? Not this 'ness."

"Is that what the nightmare was about?"

"Daaaddd, I never _said_ there was a nightmare, at least be subtle..."

"Allow me to rephrase:" Lightnux patiently folded his fingers. "are you up right now because _that_ is what is bothering you?"

"I mean..." Spyra adjusted the burlap of the dummy's tortured torso, pinching and straightening it out, like one would a worn shirt. "...it isn't helping."

"Spyra, I've lived long enough in this swamp of ours to be able to tell the stories of a hundred dragonflies. A _hundred._ Can you believe that? I got there because I read each one of them, like the stories they really are…"

"_Dad~._" Spyra rolled her eyes, groaning. "-Not the _people are all stories_ thing again…"

"-_and in reading them,_" Lightnux continued, having not even heard her, much to her dismay. "I can tell you right now, that I would know when one of them wasn't feeling right, for a specific reason."

Spyra lolled her head against her shoulder joint, and sighed, drooping her eyelids, and rudely waiting for him to get to the point.

"So what's bothering my beautiful, purple book tonight?" The dragonfly crossed his tiny arms.

"…Is that what you interrupted your beauty sleep to come up with?" His daughter snickered a second later.

"I put heart in that question, you little brat." Lightnux grumbled after a pause, making the dragoness snort with a bawl of uncontained laughter.

"-_You're such an old man._" She cackled.

"That I am, but an old man nonetheless who strives to do you the best that my abilities can offer you." The chieftain fluttered back and pointed at the dummy behind her. "Besides, you cannot seriously attempt to explain to me that you _aren't_ being bothered by something, look at that. You and I both are aware that when you get upset, you just _love_ hitting things."

"Hitting stuff isn't any less recreational than, like, _swimming,_ or taking a stroll, or finding a hobby."

"-That last one, of which, I have so strongly recommended you do." Lightnux sighed.

"_Dad,_ I'm a claws-on kind of person. Hobbies are for nerds." Spyra adjusted her haunches on the floor and waved a paw at him. "Why am I gonna' fiddle around with artsy-fartsy crap that no one will ever care about, when I can just break a mountain and change the world forever?"

"So… tearing up the straw-man behind you is helping you to break a mountain?" Her father's mandibles creased up into a smile.

"Straw-man's my _muse._" Spyra patted a palm on her golden clavicle, just above her breast. "It's not a mountain today- or, rather _tonight –_but someday, it _will be._"

"Ah. So, your dreams of mountain-homicide are what dragged you outside our home in the middle of a storm?"

"_No,_ I…" The dragon paused and looked away briefly. She cleared her throat and stood back up. "…_okayyeahIhadanightmareagain..._" –She mumbled, turning back to the dummy.

"Was that so hard?" Lightnux sagely asked, zipping to her side as she hunkered down like a feline, getting ready to pounce on the dummy again. "Is this like the other bad dreams you've been having?"

"Dad, just, let it go. I'm fine." Spyra's tail whipped, and her talons scratched into the cobble. She kneaded the rock with impatience. "I'll be inside in a bit. You don't have to stay up with me."

"Well of course, I am not _required_ to." Lightnux laughed. He cringed when Spyra gave off a loud- '_hee-yah~!' –_and struck the dummy viciously over its burlap head with a twisting swipe. The cloth ripped and hay danced down to the floor like a small cloud of dissipating, golden snow. "But my heart is in a certain place where I'm bound to."

"-_Ooyeah~?_" Spyra panted, whirling back into a ready position in front of the dummy, her vibrant, purple muscles bulging against her flanks as she began to feel the tiniest of strain from her activities. "What place is that?"

"Fatherhood." He chuckled, as if he had just sipped a fine brew of tea.

"Sounds exhausting." Spyra said before leaping forwards and cutting the dummy abreast thrice. More hay flew, and a strand landed right between Lightnux's compound eyes like a loose feather. "Maybe you should sleep on it."

"I could, perchance, abandon it, certainly." The chieftain precipitously plucked the strand off his face and flicked it away. "There is no need to be _rude_ about it."

"I'm sorry."

"All is forgiven. But much more pressing is _you._" Lightnux trailed around to her other side, ignoring her as she lashed out with a hook and summary kick. The dummy squeaked and the stake ground loudly inside the slip-in hole. "Sleep is supposed to be your temple, the time when you recuperate after a long day of responsibilities, family stress and in your case-"

"-_Yah~!_" Spyra hit the dummy so hard that the stake splintered. Lightnux sighed.

"-_physical exertion._" He concluded. "It is a time of zen. Zen is only interrupted when our minds aren't at ease."

Spyra, panting, stared at the cracked stake of the dummy and ground her fangs. The dark shrine around her did little to hide the evident frustration marring her draconic snout. While it was true, her muzzle was set in rebelliousness, only because of, well, him being who he was. _Dad_ and all. There was also something else there, something… _deeper._

Lightnux appeared on her other side, and leaned in close to say to her:

"My consul is open to you, my daughter. It always has been. I beg of you to use it. And, I'm asking you," When Spyra snorted and made to move forward again, the chieftain calmly, and sluggishly worked his wings, until he had floated into her path, where he defeated her with a simple smile of his mandibles. "…_please._ Do tell me what you saw."

The dragoness slowly worked her breathing down, darting her eyes from him to the dummy. She tried to smirk and cover herself up, as usual.

"I hope I don't piss off the woodworkers too much. I snapped that dummy's stick bad, I think. I break things too much." She said, her words quietly dueling with the roaring raindrops overhead in the dark.

Lightnux simply kept smiling, and said nothing.

When her breathing finally normalized, and she was able to flush the adrenaline enough, she sifted on her paws and sighed silently.

"…_Dad,_" She started.

"Why don't we start with something simple." He said, fluttering closer to her. "Tell me how you felt when you woke up after your dream. What emotion was in your heart? What did you experience?"

"Dad, I really don't wanna' talk about what I-"

"So then let us not focus on the situation, but merely your soul." Lightnux's words came to her like calm air. "Are you sad? Are you angry? Displeased? Or is it none of those things?"

"…I…" Spyra stepped back, and then grumbled. "… _I'm freaked out._"

"Ah. So you awoke tonight feeling… _freaked-out._" He said. She snickered at him for how he said it, but evidently, he did not notice or express care.

_He's such an old guy sometimes._

"This is something that can happen to anyone. _Happens_ to everyone. Your dream showed you something uncertain, or imprecise. I see." Lightnux folded his chitinous hands and nodded at her. "Do you think what you saw is a premonition?"

"That's stupid." Spyra scrunched her snout, looking away from him.

"Your mother might disagree." The dragonfly offered.

"Mom's a _gardener._" She squinted. "I don't want to say anything mean about it, but, dad, c'mon…"

"Plants are the neurons of our world." Lightnux said. "Just like our dreams are visions into the neurons that make our very complex minds. You're worrying over whatever it is you saw."

"I'm not afraid of anything." She denied, standing taller, pumping out her golden chest. "Mom would _agree_ with that."

"Yes she would." The chieftain chuckled again, doting on her lovingly. "My daughter. In your prime."

Spyra deflated a little bit and sheepishly took away her gaze from his blue glowing form. She grumbled something unintelligible and stared at the floor of the shrine.

"…You deny this?" He asked after a long moment of silence.

"_No._" She growled.

"Your dream, it did not-?"

"_No._ Okay, just, no… It wasn't anything like… _that._" She shivered, her orange wings twitching behind her as memories of her youth came flooding back, afternoons coming home from dragonfly school crying because all the other children hated her. "I'm not the insecure little lizard that you found in that river anymore."

"You were never insecure." Lightnux laughed, brushing off her brashness as if it was nothing. "You were, and still are, finding your way, Spyra. It is a path all people must take, throughout their entire lives, mind you. There is always a choice to be made and time to reflect on it. Is _that_ what your dream was of? The _past?_"

"No, dad."

"Then what else could _freak-out_ my purple book?" Lightnux drifted a bit closer. "What else could take away your sleep?"

Spyra gave him a toothy smile.

"You're good." She said.

The chieftain sighed sadly, but he did not drop his happy expression. He never did, even when Spyra became exhausting. He gave in.

"Perhaps another time." He stated. "I would never force you. Very well, then, are you staying up for much longer?"

"I don't know." She shrugged with her wings, her eyes wandering around the dark, as she had completely forgotten about the stupid dummy. "I was just trying to clear my head."

"If I cannot convince you to confide in me, then may I at least convince you to remember your health?"

"I'll go to bed, dad."

"Very good. My daughter," Lightnux lacked lips, of course, but they had always made due. Spyra reluctantly bowed her head, even rolling her eyes while she did it. The dragonfly laughed at her quietly, and touched their foreheads together, before fluttering past her flank. "I love you more than anything in the world."

"Even mom?" She mock-gasped, watching him as he moved for the bramble-arch of the shrine.

"Well, perhaps there is more evened ground there." Lightnux mused. "Maybe you would speak with her about whatever it is you saw in your dream?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"Goodnight, Spyra."

"G'night, dad."

There was nothing then, but her, the dark, and the roar of the rain.

Spyra rolled her eyes and looked over at one of the rows of tiny bug-sized sarcophagi slots lining the western wall. She _harrumphed _at it, and blinked.

"Well, what're you all looking at?"

Thunder crashed outside and made her jump inside her own scales.

* * *

{🐉}


	3. Chapter 2 - Swamp Echoes

**Dragon(s)layer**

**2**

* * *

**Swamp Echoes**

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}_**

* * *

The swamp always stunk in the morning. Well, it tended to stink _all day,_ but mornings were particularly ferocious on would-be victims' nostrils.

An out of control fungus population, copious decay from dead plants and timber, and great ravines filled with noxious sludge-water basically assured a rank stench. Spyra had been living here for her entire young life and she _still_ couldn't get the scent off her nose sometimes.

"Were you falling off of… a _cliff?_ Or, out of a tree? 'Cause you're not a spontaneous type. No offense."

"It wasn't off of anything it was just… I dunno, out of thin air?" Spyra grunted, leaping on top of a fallen willow tree. It was something to get off the mushy humus of the marshland for at least a little while. "There isn't much more to it. I-I mean _there is,_ but it was just me falling. You've had dreams like that before."

The dragon balanced herself by spreading out her wings. She glanced at Firefly as the little gold dragonfly hovered by her flank.

"Haven't you?" She blinked.

She could read her own father pretty good, and, heck, she could read her mom perfectly. Long evenings as a hatchling helping her tend plants and food had assured the latter. But Firefly was a little different. He was crafty. He had to be to keep his would-be pranks a secret from her until it was much too late.

Firefly had been born right after Lightnux and his wife had found Spyra as an egg. A tiny, cute, pinkish little thing, floating down a canal in a basket. At the time, the dragonflies' sense of hospitality had intermeshed with their desperate desire for a child. Honestly, Firefly was probably the happiest occurrence her parents had experienced barring her.

_Technically,_ even though blood had abandoned her, that did make her the older sibling, if not the adoptive one.

Older siblings were supposed to be able to read the younger ones easily, right?

Right?

Or… or was she just being naïve? Dragons weren't supposed to be naïve.

"I think everyone has dreams like that." Firefly tried to sound helpful as the timid words escaped his mandibles. When her bro' smiled, it looked like a mirror image of Lightnux's. Flashbacks to last night simmered in her head briefly at her seeing Firefly's expression. "Dreams of falling, dreams of being chased, and dreams of their teeth falling out."

"You'll never have to worry about the last one, clippers." Spyra winked at him as she foot-worked to the end of the log. "But what I felt wasn't just something usual. I've never had a dream that vivid before. And the fire? What was that all about?"

"How am I supposed to know? You're the one who had it." Firefly shrugged his tiny arms and span a circle around one of her horns. "_Besides,_ I think you're being paranoid."

"You're probably right."

"Positively I am. I have perception on these kinds of things." He proclaimed proudly.

"_Oh-ho,_ here we go." She rolled her eyes and hopped off the end of the timber. The ground squished a little under her heels, but she was too amused to give it much thought. "So _zen-master,_ whatever shall I do to rid myself of these abominable night terrors?"

"You scoff now, but one day, you'll see!" Firefly laughed as he followed her in the air. "_Somebody_ had to inherit mom's sight, and seeing as _I'm_ the only naturally-made baby…"

"_Ew, _dude, you're burning images in my delicate mind." Spyra clicked her tongue, wincing at horrid still-shots of the old dragonflies, Lightnux and Cometcu, appearing in her brain. "I wasn't trying to step into all that."

"I know." Firefly poked her on the cheek, making her snort. "I just like messing with you."

"Annoying little firecracker."

"I'm always here for your moments of crisis!" He mused. "Seriously though, your dreams of doom and the apocalypse? I wouldn't sweat them. We've got a lot more important things down here, on the actual real planet, to deal with."

"Yeah, like having to watch my ass so your ugly little friends don't stick something in it." The dragon flicked her tail as she walked. "You ever hear the statement _playing with fire?_"

"It wasn't my idea." Firefly snickered, reeling when she glared at him. "_Calm down! _It was over the line, I agree, I agree..."

"...Yeah, well, just be sure to tighten their leashes next time you let them out of their pens." Spyra grumbled. "I thought I got away from all that bullying when I got big enough to step on people."

"You were _always_ big enough to step on people." Firefly shuddered. "-And- _pfft- _bullying? C'mon, _Snot-Tail_, Wingwhip's a jerk, but he isn't stupid. They aren't going to push you over the edge and get squashed. No cheap laugh is worth getting biffed."

"Why didn't you apply this logic when you were still in the pond?" Spyra batted away a mushroom spore zipping loops in her face. "Remember that time I had to dive in and save you from that snapper turtle?"

"..._Ugh,_ don't remind me..." Firefly shuddered. "Nothing natural should have a mouth like that, especially a turtle. The Mayfly must have been drunk when he designed that particular species."

"Or maybe he took one look at my fat-head brother and his stupid friends, and figured natural selection was needed to quell the tide."

"I'm too beautiful to not be selected by nature."

"Nature cried when you hatched."

"_Ouch!_" Firefly laughed, pushing into her head. "From the flying iguana?"

"You've got _bug-wings._ You don't ever have to glide like I do when you fly." Spyra smiled.

The swamp produced an emerald glaze to the cloudy day sky above. Things were already gray because of the storm last night, but the murkiness rising like cigar smoke from every nook of the humus-earth was making things thick and choking.

The two of them trekked down a clearing that scythed through the marshland heights like a blade through wheat. Rising rock crags impeded their progress far to the west, and expanses of neck-high sludge-water bracketed the east. The willow trees here towered through the greenish gloom like spidery fingers, and the smell of pollen intermixed with the more foul touch of swamp-gas. The willows normally acted as shade for hidden colonies of flowers. berry bushes and even basil roots. They were overseers, clawing into the cloudy sky with abandon, where they might act to frighten an inexperienced outsider, especially in the dead of night.

Spyra had been staring at the stupid things since before she could speak proper common. Massive as they may be, and oh-so strong, all the willow trees around here were nothing special to her.

In fact, very little here _was._

"Why do you always come out here anyhow?" Firefly lowered himself beside a large mushroom cap, pinkish, and spotted with gray. He sniffed at it and snorted through his chitin.

"You don't even have a nose." Spyra sharply laughed at him as she trudged by.

"I brought up a valid point first."

"Why do I need a reason? It's just fun." The dragon shrugged her wings, finding a drier earth-bridge to cross a sickly patch of greenish muck. Crows cawed overhead and the cicadas broached as she balanced on the dirt. "It's something to look into. Exploring and whatnot. Think about all the little crags and niches we _haven't_ checked in comparison to the ones we have!"

"Yeah, I'm sure those unseen holes stink just as bad." The dragonfly grunted, snorting more shroom-particles from his mouth-pieces. "Dad says the mushrooms are getting bigger."

"Where? In the north?" Spyra was only half-listening. She had stopped on the edge of the little bridge and was bent over, examining a small, moving anomaly taking root in the water with keen interest. "Yeah, mom's saying bad mojo is going down up there. I was meaning to go take a look myself."

_"No!_ Don't do that. Everything's getting bigger, and more dangerous, and poisonous or whatnot in the north. The swamp there isn't safe!" Firefly shuddered so much that little golden dust sauntered off his wings. "Gives me the creeps."

"The Forbidden Funguswood." She spat it out her chops like it was a joke, which, to her it was, much to Firefly's chagrin.

"You can't take anything seriously, can't you?" He badgered. "And what are you looking at?"

"Waitasec, bro, don't get too-"

**_Thw-wumpp~!_**

_"-…close._"

One second was all it took for a slimy, brown-colored _tongue_ to shoot out of the shallows, wrap around poor Firefly's little thorax and slurp the dragonfly up.

Spyra- in contrast to panicking –simply sighed and sat on her haunches, watching with annoyance as the water sloshed, sprayed and moved, and a large, fat and bulbous _Toadwort_ started to crawl out of the muck.

"_Oh,_ Firefly, what would you do without me?" The dragon blinked with disinterest.

"-_Heeeeeellllllmmmmmppppp~!_" –Came the muffled shriek of her brother from inside the plant's gut. The thing produced a walloping garble, and smacked its own crop with an errant leaf to silent its tasty- yet shrilly loud –prey. **_Slap~! _**–wiggled its bulbous stomach.

"-_Ouch-_" –Her brother muffled.

Toadwort's were only roughly humanoid. It was essentially a gooey ball with two fronds for legs and two leaves for graspers. It was all capped with a bluntly-fanged flytrap-esque head covered in white liver spots. She'd seen things more frightening in dumps she'd taken.

The creature continued rising out of the swamp-shit until it stood a single head over the purple dragon. It opened its slime-dripping maw and gurgled at her in some effort to intimidate her, flecking green puss and tan-tinted plant-saliva all over the place. Spyra grimaced and turned her snout away with a scrunched nose.

"-_Pew~! It's called a toothbrush, buddy…_" She waved a paw in her face.

"-_Spyhwa~! Spyhwa, hellmpp meehhh~!_" –Firefly blotted inside. The Toadwort croaked curiously and slapped its jiggling crop again. **_Schlap~!_** "_-Ouch_\- _Ohmyygawhdd~! It's awhfull in eerreee~! My wiinnghhhss are melltttinnnngg~!_"

"Technically, you still have an hour before the thing's digestive juices start to work." Spyra yawned, examining one of her paw's talons. "What you really have to worry about is _oxygen._ Though, I bet a little guy like you would last for a bit, inside tubby's tight guts."

"-_Spywhaaaaa~!_" –Firefly sang. The Toadwort shifted on its tendrils and smacked its stomach again. **_Plat. _**"-_Ouch- Spywha~! Yuu stuhpidd lizarddd, gehttt mee outtt~! Nowwww~!_"

"I'm not a lizard, I'm a _dragon._" She guffawed, standing up and flicking her tail. The Toadwort gurgled again and backed off deeper into the swamp sludge, holding out its stubby leaf-arms defensively. She grinned ferally, and her talons slipped from their joints with an audible **_slck~! _**"And dragons don't like it when flytraps on steroids eat their brothers."

The Toadwort could visibly be seen gulping_._

She _wished_ she had a legion of these things instead of those stupid dummies. They were much more entertaining to slaughter. Just a quick slash across the neck, and the fat head was rolling through the swamp air, where it splashed heavily to oblivion in the water nearby.

Another hack and the jiggly crop spilled all its mushy, mud-looking innards all across the dirt. _One_ of those stomach contents was a screaming, golden glowing dragonfly who was writhing on the ground in terror.

The Toadwort stumbled back on its fronds, headless and disemboweled. Spyra sighed at the image with content, and cut off her combat pose, politely giggling at the walking corpse.

**_Splash~! _**–it tumbled back and sank back-first into the sludge, bleeding darkly-colored plant fluid to float in the water like a pool of oil.

"…_O-Oh my… Oh…_" Firefly rolled over in a slick mess. He coughed up black bile and twitched in horror, colored browner than a cow's turd and much less like the annoying glow-toy he normally was. "…_G-Gonna' be sick…_" He gagged crazily, his soiled wings trilling underneath hills of gut-sludge.

"Which one of us, you or me?" Spyra stepped closer and snorted at the smell. "Aw, man, bro', what is it with you and touching before _looking?_ Adventurers can't be curious like cats."

"_…Y-You're the one… who wanted to be an adventurer…_" Firefly coughed, pointing at her weakly from the pile of slime. "…_I was just… looking… at the _water_…_"

"Only one way to fix a stank like that." She pinched one of his wings. "_Water!_"

"-_Waitnononono-!_"

Firefly screeched all the way through the air until he hit the marsh pool nearby with a tiny _plop~!_ Spyra chuckled and wiped her talons off on a branch.

When Firefly finally clawed his way out of the shallows, leaving a skid in the mushy earth behind him, he face-planted in the humus, his wings a crinkled mess across his back.

"Well, now you only stink like _one_ corpse and not a pile of twenty." Spyra chided humorously as she stood over him. "You see why I like to explore out here?"

Firefly slowly looked up from the ground, his mandibles caught, and sludge dripping from his little bug-face. Spyra grinned toothily.

"Because it's _fun_."

"I hate you." He spat.

* * *

{🐉}

"Did your brother get swallowed by a Toadwort _again?_"

"Yup."

Cometcu was probably the most collected soul in the bramble. She rarely lost her temper, and something about that pinkish light always coming off her tiny form seemed to soothe everyone who saw it.

But right now, as she stared at her adopted daughter and noted with much concern the proud _smile_ across her muzzle, she couldn't help but huff.

"Young lady," She started.

"-_Aw, _mom! I _hate_ when you call me that!" Spyra groaned, burying her face under her paws. "You sound like an old Timbergarden Teacher scolding nymphs!"

"-Nymphs, dragonflies or _dragons_, Spyra, I will not let something like this go." Cometcu wagged a chitinous finger. "Your brother is all you have! All _we_ have! You're the older sister. You should've been watching him."

"All I _do_ is watch him, mom." The dragon rolled her eyes. "It isn't my fault _he_ can't watch where he steps."

"He flies."

"Semantics." Spyra reasoned, gesturing with her claw. "I didn't tell him to stick his face in the water and try and kiss the thing like he did."

"-_That's exaggerated-~!_" –Came a groan from Firefly's room. A moment later, and the air was tinged with the horrid sound of distant wretching.

Cometcu sighed and dusted off her tiny hands, looking down at the floor as silence bled into the argument. The kitchen was probably the single greatest source of what Spyra would brashly call: '_action' _-in the whole thicket house. This was where Cometcu had first learned how to cook meat after Spyra got sick from not having it in her diet. This was where Firefly had first dumped a mug of tea over Spyra's head when they were both tiny, and she had responded by throwing him out the very window behind Cometcu's head.

"He'll be sick for days, I can already see it." She muttered defeatedly, using a little rag to wipe her hands off.

"He'll get back on his feet- _err –_wings, like he always does. It's a family trait, mom: _springy,_ remember?" Spyra shrugged. "It really wasn't my fault. I was just doing my rounds, and he wanted to come along and-"

"_Spyra,_" Cometcu interrupted tiredly. "this isn't about all of that, in fact, it isn't even about just responsibility. This is about your recklessness."

"_Recklessness._" The word was a rock to Spyra's ego. She was a dragon! Dragons weren't reckless, they were practiced and meticulous. Everything she did, her patrols, her venturing around the swamp, it was all for her and her surrogate family's protection.

…it just so happened that it doubled as the only thing in her miserable little marsh-life that gave her any semblance of enjoyment, but that was beside the point. Though torturing her brother certainly had alleviated many a dark day.

Maybe when he got better, she'd hit him with a salamander egg. Or a rock. No, definitely the egg, he'd never be able to get the goop off...

"What do you know about _recklessness_, mom?" The dragon pouted, turning up her purple nose.

"-_More than you~!_" –Came from the other room between wretches.

"Shut up, Toadstool breath!" She shot back.

"I've studied the dragonfly mind since I was a nymph." Cometcu smiled calmly, ignoring the jab from her daughter. "Understanding life, understanding the mind. I've known these things since long before you were an egg, in that basket, on that canal, my little dragon."

Spyra had been preparing to shoot back another quick one, but held her temper. Instead, anything that had been boiling her throat came out as nothing more than a dispersal of air.

"Alright, I didn't mean it like that, _sorry._" She said that last word so lowly that Cometcu almost didn't hear her. "I busted him out of its guts, though, I get kudos for heroism, right? I technically risked my life."

"-_You kill Toadworts by the bushel-!_" Firefly hollered. "_-And you hesitated-! You started-_" -Another wretch. "-_describing to me it's digestive juices-! WHILE I WAS INSIDE OF IT-!_"

Cometcu's mandibles gaped. "_Spyra!_"

"He's exaggerating! It's the sickness, it's making him delusional."

"-_I can perfectly articulate what you're saying-_"

"Don't follow the light, and breathe in through your mandibles and out through your... _mandibles..._" Spyra cringed, wiggling her nose. "Taking blessings for granted, eh? Look, mom, Firefly's fine. I gotta' make a few stops, but then I'm going out again, I still haven't finished my usual routes. Do you guys need dinner?"

"If by _you guys,_ you mean me, your father and your very sick, vomiting brother, then _no,_ my little dragon. We have enough for tonight." Cometcu sadly sighed. "Can you please promise me at least that you'll be careful from now on? I know I can't stop you from exploring, and traveling, it's-"

Cometcu smiled hopefully as Spyra stopped in the frame of the bramble.

"…it's who you are." She said.

"Yeah, mom, I promise." Spyra looked at her past her wing-joint, her purple hide highlighted bronze from the streaming sunlight outside the kitchen nook. Now that it wasn't so early in the day, the swamp was actually beginning to represent some kind of victual of beauty. "I'll be back by dinner."

"Please see to it that you are." The pink dragonfly nodded. "-_Oh! _And stay away from the Forbidden Funguswood. I've spoken with the plants. They tell dire stories of that place. Something very strange is happening there, even your father can feel it."

Spyra stared at her for a moment and then grunted.

"No Forbidden Funguswood, got it." She grinned daggers. "Don't fret, mom, I'll go nowhere near it."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion OST- Sunrise Of Flutes_**

* * *

Spyra was still grumbling to herself about the whole thing. It really hadn't been her fault! Firefly was too nosy for his own good, and out past the fringes of the village, you were bound to step on a landmine sooner or later when you had the perception of a log.

He'd be fine in a few days. He had grown up in the very same water Toadworts liked to hang out in. There had to be some kind of genetic resistance to things like that for dragonflies... Something about gut-health?

Eh.

At least _she_ wasn't the one hacking up her own spleen.

Humming, she passed under the bramble frame of one of the village soap-makers, an elderly blue dragonfly named _Saphide._

Spyra had grilled him once or twice about his _real_ name, but the stubborn old coot had stuck with it through thick and thin. It was really just a title he'd gotten because as dragonflies aged, their hides started to crack, become ridged and would ooze, resembling the surfaces of scriptures carved on ancient tablets.

Saphide was so old that someone probably could pluck him out of the air and throw him like a rock. His mandibles were sunken, his eyes were turning misty, and all of his bodily weight had gone into his abdomen, rendering his tired, flimsy wings overworked at the best of times. Honestly, he looked like a fat, bloated fly. It was strange seeing such an unhealthy guy ironically being so good as making something for _cleanliness._ He probably envied his own customers.

"_Heya', Sappy! _Purple Dragoness at two-o-clock coming right atchya'." Spyra sauntered with a noticeable wriggle of her trunk-junk and tail to the little counter barrier in the center of the bramble. "-Sappy, c'mon, I know you're back there..."

Hmm.

Nothing.

The back of the thicket was devoid of anything but tiny wicker baskets filled with soap bars wrapped in leaf casings. Most of them were the size of pebbles in comparison to her. But the soap-makers- by order of Lightnux -had been making _special_ bars for her since she had first come here in addition to the usual stock.

And right now, she was due for a fresh basket of them. The weekly drop, as it was.

The dragoness leaned over the little wooden counter and drummed her talons expectantly, eyes darting around as she searched back and forth for the old insect.

"_Yo! _Old man! I know you got a complex for people whose bodily functions work without a hitch, but lady-Spyra needs her feminine beauty to survive out here! _Beauty means I need soap! _So swing your abdomen and get your flaking be-hind out here!"

A light buzzing caught her attention as she quieted down and focused on the back archway leading to where the proprietor lived. Saphide bobbed through the frame a moment later, his bloated abdomen swinging underneath him as he struggled with his own weight. One of his misty eyes was pinched shut, and his mandibles were daggered in a sneer.

Spyra leaned over the counter and beamed at him toothily, her tail wagging like a dog's.

"How are ya', Sappy?" She chirped, winking.

"It's a good thing we have the rapport we do, or else, I might believe some of that nonsense you said just now..." Saphide's voice sounded like sandpaper being dragged against tree bark. The fat dragonfly itched his neck chitin and buzzed over to the mounds of baskets behind the counter. "You could have just taken it. Soap is a community benefit."

"Yeah, but where would the fun be in that? I'm a poised girl, Sappy, I don't keep my sparkling attitude by avoiding people." The dragon watched him idly as he sifted aside some of the little wickers, his arms quivering even for just lifting _one._ "How's the trade?"

"Well," Saphide moved another basket of dragonfly-sized bars with a grunt. "there's stock coming out my exoskeleton, the thicket has yet to burn down, and you continue to reassure me of my dashingly good looks every time you come here... which I am still waiting for to make up for your yelling."

"Don't fret it." Spyra winked. "You're sexy as ever, old man, take it from the dragon, I get around these parts enough to pick out a nasty wort or a gem."

"Aren't you sweet..." Saphide dryly chuckled, quivering as he dug his fingers into the underside of another basket, and heaved. It only twitched a little. "-_Gah! _Things are getting heavier..."

"Women are the worst victims to send fat-jokes at."

"Not you, the _basket. _I can't get it up."

"Phrasing?" Spyra giggled.

"It's starting to not be funny anymore. I make you soap. You don't have to mean to me." The old dragonfly buzzed back a bit and stroked his aching little fingers, embarrassed.

"Aw jeez', I'm sorry, I'm in poker-prodder big-sister mode today, I'm talking like I'm berating Firefly. Lemme' come around the counter and get that for ya'." Spyra flicked her wings and trotted over. "Maybe you should see mom for a salve? It's your joints buggin' ya', right?"

"Yes." Saphide sighed as he rested his abdomen on the counter and sat down, watching as the large reptile ducked to the counter level and nudged a paw into the stack of baskets. "When you go this long in the world, you gather rust with all your sightseeing. Be careful with those, you'll knock the whole pile down."

"If you wanna' talk about deep stuff: a benefit of youth is either precision or complete situational autism." Spyra smirked. "Lucky for both of us, I've got the _prior,_ and in loads."

"What happened with Firefly? Is he okay?"

All of the villagers knew each other. There wasn't a family in the community who kept to themselves and did not readily offer assistance to neighbors in need. Of course, Spyra's family had always been treated a _little_ differently on account of the whole adopted-draconic-child thing, but once she'd gotten older and teethed out the moody behavior, everyone had acclimated nicely.

"He got swallowed by a Toadwort."

"Again?"

"_Yeeeup._"

"You and that nymph are going to get yourselves in trouble, the two of you wandering around past the village fringe at all hours of the day." Saphide picked at some of the amber-colored scabs on his hide as Spyra sifted through the tens of soap baskets, humming when she found what she was looking for. "There are things out there uglier than me, and with more bite and claw. Haven't you heard about the Funguswood? Something's happening in that thicket, and it reeks of black magic."

"The only _black magic_ around here is the shit that gets caught in my toes. Thank god you make soap, old man. Hey, I haven't scrubbed today yet, you wanna' see?" Spyra held up a rear-paw in the dragonfly's face, making him chortle in dry laughter.

"Get out of my thicket, you whippersnapper." He hacked.

"Mom didn't say anything about black magic." She trailed. "I mean, I know she wouldn't, at least not up front. But if those scriptures in the Mayfly shrine are right, magic hasn't been seen in the swamps for decades."

"I don't know these things." Saphide held his hands up, shuffling on the counter. "I just make soap."

"I'm sure if something was going down, mom would warn us. But, hey, the day's young. You should get out and get a tan while you're at it." Spyra held a large wicker basket by the loop in her mouth, filled with a handful of rounded soap bars wrapped in frond leaves. "Besides, don't take what I gotta' say to heart, Sappy', you're still on the market. What about Fragrence? You talk to her?"

"The older fly down by the nymph pond?" Saphide blinked. "What are you trying to do? Getting me riled up for something out of my league..."

"There ain't no leagues. Just effort." Spyra winked lastly and happily trotted out the arch. "I'll check ya', Sappy, _go talk to Fragrence,_ she's lonely too."

Saphide tiredly raised a hand and watched the village's sole draconic citizen walk out into the daylight outside. He picked at his wrist, and hummed through his mandibles.

Fragrence was starting to chip too, wasn't she? And she had a _yellow_ glow. Saphide liked the color yellow, even if he was losing the ability to tell hues apart anymore because of his eyes...

Hell, maybe he'd give it a shot. Anyone made better company than a pile of soap bars.

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}_**

* * *

Spyra stopped at home to drop off her care products before heading for the village edge. In her little nook of a room, she could hear Firefly talking through the thicket's natural walls.

It started as a residual hum of indecipherable speech, and Spyra wasn't normally an eavesdropper. But she could pick out a few words, like: _Spyra -_and- _Worried._

What the hell.

Maybe being a fly on the wall might enlighten her to some surprise party her adoptive family was planning for her. But her birthday (the day they found her basket) -wasn't coming up, and she hadn't done anything recently exceptional. Maybe Firefly was suggesting to one of their parents that they punish her for what happened?

Spyra snorted soot out her nose and marched out of her room, pressing a horn to the wall just outside her brother's nook.

_We'll see about that, you talking sparkler. I'll leave a salamander pie in your nest if you start tattling on me all the time..._

"..._I'm kind of, sort of, worried about her. 'Cause, she was comfortable telling me, and not either of you, and that seems, y'know, like... weird..._" Firefly said, muffled through the wood and earth. "_She's been having nightmares a lot, but this one was new. She was tumbling out of the sky, and she was on fire. I know she breathes the stuff, but that seems a little extreme..._"

"_Did she ask that you not tell me?_" It was Lightnux's voice next.

"_...Not directly, but..."_

_"Definitely implied?_"

"_You know how she is..._"

"_Well, I certainly appreciate you telling me regardless, especially after the incident earlier today... Are you feeling any better? Still having stomach_ _cramps?_"

"_No, I think I barfed up most of the mud, it's just a few dry heaves. Oh, by the way, I filled the last bowl, and uh... neither of you were here to take it away, so I kind of, sort of dumped it out my window._"

"_What?!_" Lightnux barked. "_No! No, my son, civilized flies don't do these things!_"

"_But I'm weak and fragile, and I could not travel the thicket in such dark, sickly times..._"

"_You had enough energy to flutter over to your window and dump your vomit on our yard!_"

"_It's all mud anyway!_"

Spyra snickered against her own will. She had _definitely_ rubbed off on her little brother. Her musings made her go pale as she slapped a paw over her snout. The conversation inside Firefly's room went silent.

"..._Spyra? Is that you?_" Lightnux asked.

Spyra danced away and swept into her room nook, almost tripping over her own nest as she scrambled to pick up soap bars from the basket to make herself look busy.

"Oh, there you are." Lightnux appeared in her arch's frame, and mandible-smiled. "I didn't hear you come back in."

"Yeah, sorry pops, I'm in a bit of rush to put this soap away and get back out there and... y'know... _patrol,_ do my rounds..." Spyra fiddled back and forth, moving the bars with little to no direction as she desperately tried to find anything else to look at besides her father's eyes.

"...Ah, a rush. That must be why you're putting the soap in your bed." Lightnux smiled.

"_Wha-?_" Spyra blinked and looked down at what she was doing. Half the pile was still in the basket, the other half was in the center of her nest. "Huh, fancy that. I, uh... I enjoy a clean nest."

"Your brother is right to be worried about you, even after the whole Toadwort accident before." The older dragonfly mused. "I'm sorry that you didn't feel comfortable sharing with me your dream last night. I won't press you for details."

"Well by the sound of it, nine-carrot lips in the other room told you the gist of it." Spyra sat on her haunches and huffed. "It just bothered me because it felt more real than any of the other ones. And it was so clear! Normally, everything's hazy, and there's only snippets I remember... dark stuff, like black shapes, white eyes, a dragon with blood running down its chest."

"I remember you saying."

"This time it was like reading a scroll, like it was a story. I was falling, and on fire, and I hit the ground." She stared into space, recollections of the dream cycling through her mind briefly. "It really rattled my scales, and that takes effort."

Spyra sniffed, and looked between the soap basket and her father.

"...Should I say _the end?_"

"No, I'm just thinking." Lightnux smiled. "...In lighter news, Cometcu thinks Firefly will have flushed out his system within a day or two. Soon, he'll be back in the air."

"Cool, I'm glad." Spyra picked at her talon. "...It really wasn't my fault, what happened."

"No one is blaming you, we just want you to be careful, both of you, because me and your mother love you with all our hearts. You don't have to feel guilty- and I know you do -don't look at me that way, I know that look. Going beyond the edges of the village is _dangerous, _which I know you know. There are creatures out there, aggressive ones, ones who will make a quick meal out of a dragonfly."

"Like what mom's saying about the north."

"Yes, like what mom is saying about the north. But your usual rounds don't go anywhere near the Funguswood, so I won't nag you about what you already know I ask of you..."

"Uh-huh."

"...Well, if that settles all that can be settled." Lightnux put his hands on his little hips. It was weird, having those and no legs, just an abdomen. Spyra was smiling at him because of the very non-fly gesture. "Be back before dark."

"Yes, dad."

As soon as Lightnux's wings fluttered away to silence, Spyra stood up, her tail whipping as she dug through her mind.

Now what did she do? Her only exploring partner was sicker than a mule. Her rounds weren't as wholesome without someone to chat with. She briefly considered picking up what she had tried once as a hatchling, finding a rock, and drawing a face on it and naming it '_Balding'._

It had been cute years ago, but now it'd probably just be creepy. Scratch that. Not an option.

_Oh well,_ Spyra puffed through her chops and glumly trotted around to start leaving the thicket. _I'm used to being by myself anyway._

"Feel better, squirt! I'm off to save the world and kick ass." Spyra wrapped a wing on Firefly's arch frame as she passed by. "I'll be sure to save you a doubloon when I dig up some king's lost horde."

"..._King's horde..._" Firefly mumbled inside. "..._That'll be the day._"

"Who knows," Spyra grinned like a degenerate and peered around to make sure Cometcu and Lightnux weren't in the thicket. "-maybe there'll be ruby-encrusted dildos and I can keep you up all night with my feverish orgasms."

"-_Ugh-! Eew-! You horrible person, now I can't unsee that-!_"

Spyra cackled and gave him a raspberry before prancing like a deer and heading outside, ready to begin her usual journeys.

* * *

{🐉}

"Off again, Spyra?" Dredgelit was the village's sentry out on watch today. He peered at her as she trotted by and out into the swamp, past the boundaries of the brambles that made their home.

"You know it, Dredgy'." Spyra smirked daggers. "Your watch shouldn't be too bad. I already killed everything worth killing out there for ya'."

"Aren't you a peach." Dredgelit chuckled. He was a darkly colored green fly of the tribe, with a really deep voice for someone so small.

"We've actually decided that I'm the village _plum._" Spyra specified over her wing. "I think they're related to peaches anyhow, so it works."

The sky was still a bit cloudy and a pleasantly warm wind had settled among all the grottos and willows. Toads and crickets were dueling for the spotlight through their songs and calls. Mushroom spores danced in the breeze, and sunlight streamed through tree-sized mushroom caps as blue or pink light.

Without Firefly dragging her down, things sped up significantly. She could vault gaps in the water, glide over mud slicks and sprint on all fours like a clinging salamander down trunks and up trees and rocks.

This was what she loved about exploring. It was the freedom, and the _danger._

_I could use some of that last bit right now..._

Right as she thought of that, a consistent drone caught her attention whilst she landed in a cleared grove.

The dragoness' keen sense of hearing directed her to angle her snout eastward. Sloughing from the shadows of a willow canopy was a brownly colored _thing_ bobbing in the air towards her. It was almost as big as her, and had two beady, black eyes that were focused right on her. A green-liquid dripped occasionally from the erect end of a proboscis sticking from the giant insect's chin.

Not all the mosquitos here were tiny and insignificant. Spyra only grinned at it and pumped out her chest.

"_Heya' there,_ big boy." She giggled. "Let's play."

The mosquito produced a shrill noise and descended for her in a nosedive, its wings chattering like buzzsaws.

The grove flashed amber and the sound of chitin tearing was pronounced. A moment later, and a mangled, scorched, unidentifiable mass of steaming bug-meat came catapulting out from behind one of the willows. It soared over the marshland like a fat smoke-meteor, before it hit a boulder with a hideous **_crack~! _**–and rolled to oblivion in some grass.

Spyra surmounted a few rocks and stared on with glee, her tail whipping in placated strokes.

"Better than training dummies." She smiled. "Better than sitting in that stupid village and rotting my purple arse' off."

It wasn't so much that she _hated_ where she lived...

But she wondered why there couldn't be someone else besides _dragonflies, _someone who was the same size as her, that could come out here and kill giant bugs with her, or explore with her, and use profanity with her.

Her mother was too busy sniffing weeds, her father managing minute politics and her brother sleeping or getting into trouble all the time for them to really fill that social gap that she was experiencing.

Why did she always have to be this alone? She didn't remember it being so pronounced when she'd been younger.

Though, that had been the time when she had been a hatchling, and the dragonfly children were afraid to play with her in dragonfly school. When she had been a young, juvenile dragoness, none of the older nymphs would go near her or even look at her.

People back home could talk about the goodness of it all they wanted, but nobody in that hole was doubting the facts. Heck, even the elders had encouraged her parents to toss her egg back in the canal and, in quote: "_Not risk such a unique find impacting the community."_

It was hard to believe that they all had started with _that,_ and ended up with what everything was like now.

The dragonflies had a soap bar _and_ a meat quota, all set up by the community for one dragon.

She was lonely, sure, and there were issues in her head. But daily life was... pretty okay, if not boring.

Spyra licked her muzzle as she walked. She hadn't had lunch earlier before leaving with Firefly, and the whole Toadwort run-in had basically screwed up her schedule. She must have forgotten.

_It'll probably be roasted salamander again anyway, _Spyra rolled her eyes, stopping by the flank of a peat-puddle to look around. _Even the jerky is better than that stuff..._

The swamp water down below her claws showed her her own reflection. There she was, in the dim light, wavering in the water, with her snout, her ridged back and her orange-yellow wings.

She was haughty enough to tell herself she looked pretty. At least, for _dragon_ standards. All dragonesses wanted to be told they were pretty, even if they didn't admit it. Spyra hummed under her breath and quirked a brow, edging her haunch over her flank to try and get a view of the top bump of her thigh past her shoulder.

She _was_ pretty curvy. It was all the training and hiking she did. It kept her muscles toned, lean and fluent. She could move like greased lightning because of the exercise.

But exercise wasn't just why she was out here, and… and neither was it for gazing at herself like some fawning douchebag.

_"Igghhh~._" She clicked her tongue and sat on a rock, staring up at the cloudy sky. "I wish there were other dragons here. Dragons. People like _me!_ So I wouldn't feel so alone all the time."

Clearing her throat as she began to realize what she was doing, the dragon took a double-take around her, and stared off back in the direction of her village.

_You watch, Firefly isn't feeling as sick as he made it sound and up he comes, flittering right behind me just as I'm pouring out my soul to…_

She looked back up at the sky.

_…to a bunch of stupid clouds._

Spyra snorted.

Eh.

What the hell? It wasn't like anyone was listening anyway.

"Give me dragons." She muttered. "Give me real, living _dragons._ People who look like me, who _think_ like me. People who get me. Strong people. Another girl to hang with. Someone cool. Someone _tough._ Maybe even… maybe even a _guy._"

She blinked at that last part.

Males… _boys._ Her mom had warned her about boys. But Cometcu had only told her about _dragonfly boys,_ and all of them had been too afraid of her to even come near her during the years of hormonal chaos so affectionately called _youth_.

_Not that I would've hitched a ride with a _bug_ anyhow…_

But what about boys? _Dragon boys._ Boy dragons. That was something little explored for her, ironically, even after all this time she'd spent in the swamps, doing nothing _but _exploring.

What were boys like anyhow? Ones that were actually worth something. Not these scrawny damsel flies whipping around to high heck and farting glitter, like her rock-head brother and his stupid little friends.

_Not that I _need_ boys or anything, but… hey, a female can wonder._

She snorted at the clouds.

_A lonely, isolated, hick of a female who's got nothing to her name and runs a pastime of finding funny smelling mushrooms, and yanking screaming siblings out of carnivorous plants' guts._

Her tail whipped.

_Why can't I have a miracle? Something to change my boring life, and get me out of this awful, stinking swamp?_

Right as she was frowning at the clouds, it happened.

There was a thud, and the snapping of a twig. It all jolted her completely from the realm of daydreaming, and sky-talking.

Spyra hunched on the rock, and looked around wildly at the marshland. For a long time, there was nothing but rising swamp-gas, dark reeds and tall willow trees.

_What in the Ancestors' mothers was _that?

**_BMMmmmmmm….~!_**

-There it was again. A thud, a crash, this time, the sound of earth crumbling.

She squinted and looked up at the sky. It was cloudy, but… no thunder today, no rain, not like last night.

So what was-

**_BMMMMMmmmmmm….~!_**

The next explosion was louder, and was so sudden, that the dragoness found herself scrabbling in the air like a flipped cockroach as she lost her balance and fell onto her back.

Panting, she rolled behind the rock she'd been sitting on, and compressed herself to the earth, making herself as small as possible. She peeked over the stone, her purple eyes darting.

_Right there! What is that?_

Spyra narrowed her eyes, trying to penetrate the swamp-mist and the foliage. There was something bright amber in the depths of the woods. Something close.

But it was…

_North._

Spyra gulped a huge lump down and blinked. That was where even the animals were afraid to go, rumors were saying. That was where her mother had _forbidden_ her and Firefly to play near.

That was towards the Forbidden Funguswood. She had _never_ explored there. That was the deepest portion of the upper swamps. It was, like, the fringe of _the_ _fringe_ of her village. Foreigncountry. Completely alien to her and the dragonflies altogether.

_Oh, cripes._

Spyra looked back towards home, and then back at the flickering light in the distance. She whined and tapped her talons.

_...There was no way they would ever know._

An adventurous grin slowly crept onto her face.

_There was no way they'd _need_ to know. Just a peak. Besides,_ she hopped over the rock and padded with gusto towards the light. _I'm not afraid of anything._

* * *

{🐉}


	4. Chapter 3 - The Cloud Ripper

**Dragon(s)layer**

**3**

* * *

**The Cloud Ripper**

* * *

_**{Black Mesa Soundtrack: Black Mesa Theme - Mesa Remix}**_

* * *

Cynder _hated_ mushrooms. She always had ever since she had been a hatchling. Something about their appearance, their repugnant gait and their sheer stench was offputting to her.

The black scales running down her regal back glinted in the distant sun's rays as she twisted away from the railing, and by extension, the strongest veins of the deathly scent. She scrunched her snout and snorted, casting a displeased sneeze in the direction of what was helping along her bad mood.

Dragons possessed doubly the senses of what other organisms did. Many people might find the local fauna of the Southern Swamps as a mere nuisance. But to Cynder their very presence was offensive. It was a mixture of wet soil and _puss, _the smell they gave off_._

She hated it. Almost as much as she hated how badly her servants smelled too. All of them already stank ripely of feces and piss (much to the chagrin of her poor nose). And together with the mushrooms it created an air-funnel of wreaking horror that had driven her sinuses to the breaking point.

_Terrible._

Cynder pinched two of her talons on a small chainlink dangling around the softer, crimson scales plating down her more vulnerable belly and inner chest. At the end was a tiny brooch, glinting silver in the daylight haze. She shoved the hole-riddled surface of it against the tip of her snout and inhaled very deeply.

The brooch was stuffed with crushed mint and herbal excretions. Close breaths like that were enough to numb her sinuses for at least a few hours. Of course, none of that relief came without its own price. Cynder slapped her chops with distaste and let the brooch tap back onto her breast.

Snorting the herbs gave her an aftertaste she certainly didn't appreciate on the back of her serpentine tongue. Out here it was all a bombardment of her senses. As if there weren't enough reasons for her to be flaming mad all the time.

"You know disdain is pure when you can physically taste it in your own air." She spoke aloud, her voice something of a smoky, toned song that always drew attention no matter the listener. Her ghost-white eyes glowed a bit more vibrantly as she cast them down past the taloned ridge of one of her slender paws. "What say you, Orderly?"

"Gigaw's words not wise. Gigaw's words not matter-of-fact and just. Not like Mistress' words_._" A trembling, green, growth-ridden abomination quivered by her foot. Green rivers of noxious puss fled in miniature canals down ridged,wood-like skin covering an exterior skeleton of stacked fungus slabs and bundles of flesh-moss. "Gigaw say; Mistress always _right._"

The creature's name was Gigaw. He had been the Orderly her master had assigned to cater not only to her every whim, but also care for the deteriorating hulk of the Forlorn Watch; her home and base of operations in the south.

Gigaw was a green little snotrag. A _Grublin._ One of her master's more obscene and widely spread races of '_Children'_ that the world had experienced the misfortune of having birthed from its own soil. Gigaw was no higher than the mighty dragon's knee and had to crane his triangular head upwards to leer at her with a pair of blood-red eyes. He was truly a hideous thing. Cynder hated him too. He had only fueled many evenings spent dreaming about her own perfect fantasy.

Would it be that she had the power to singe away the Forbidden Funguswood surrounding the base of her tower and turn it all into a field of naught but _glass._ She'd do away with the horrid fauna of this swamp to its last. Burn everything and kill it quickly and efficiently. Then, she'd toss Gigaw in a sump and enslave the insect populations due south, make them fix the Forlorn Watch and erect it back to its long forgotten majesty, during the age of the Old Kingdom.

Cynder preened at the pleasant fantasy, flexing her beautiful, crimson wings behind her back. Her appearance was quite the contrast to her hellish servant, and most of the environment here.

Where Gigaw was deformed and tiny, she was buxom and curvaceous. Cynder's body was the prime of her pride and upkeep. Maintaining it was a necessity that she held in high regard, and frowned upon those who did not similarly pursue perfection to a mania.

She was wreathed head to toe in a reflective coat of black scales that shone whatever haze of light or aura currently mimicked her surroundings. Crimson plates of lusciously smooth underscale ran down her rotund breast, and down into the dimpled curve of her belly. Her hips were full and her legs empowered by twisting bands of cabled muscle that slept under beds of paunch fat.

Her forelimbs were thin and could be mistaken for quaint in their femininity. Tight bands of chrome metal sealed her wrists and ankles. The chain she wore hung over a spiked choker that capped the base of her regally twisting neck.

Six ivory horns sprouted from the back of her spined skull, and her face was highlighted with ancient rune-scripts that had been branded into her cheek scales and forehead from rituals undertaken when she had been a hatchling. Their presence lingered like dulling tattoos of slightly pinked texture.

Years of battle service, licked by a taste from the tongue of darkest magic had sculpted her into a living piece of artwork. She was an ornate weapon. An emblem of the Dark Mistress' armies. She was Warlord of the South.

_Cloud Ripper._

The inhabitants of the Southern Marshes called her the Cloud Ripper.

Cynder had never fainted or realized an interest in things so paltry as titles. But the fear she deliciously injected in whatever landscape she inhabited was plump and endearing. _That_ was a smell she could appreciate, and it had a fine taste too, unlike all these damn mushrooms.

She turned a lazy eye down at the quivering Grublin by her foot.

"Do Grublins procrastinate?" She asked.

"Grublins?" Gigaw went rigid, peering at her as if she had spoken an unknown tongue. After a pause, he twitched and made a pleased trill. "_Ah! _Yes. Grublin-kin _always_ procrastinate. Gigaw is fine exception, but most of Gigaw's kind not understand action, not understand success."

"Ah." Cynder leaned over the railing, her gaze peaking around the dark thickets of the Funguswood below. "I never extended the reach of my studies to the subject of my Mistress' creations and their social cues."

"Mistress' goals are too great for lowly Grublins!"

As freakish as he was, Gigaw understood the concept of being a kiss-ass. Everything out of his mouth-holes was a combination of brief reports, haphazard complaining, and heaps upon heaps of overindulged flattery. Cynder had enjoyed having her ego stroked, like she was a purring cat, for the first few weeks.

After a month, she had given him orders to remain silent unless spoken to. But even that little relief didn't get rid of her nose-aches and her toxic boredom.

"Whatever my Mistress seeks in these befouled reaches is beyond me." Cynder vented aloud, not caring if Gigaw did or didn't hear her. It wasn't as if he or her Mistress were in any position to impose _discipline_ for something so low as griping. "She leaves me to stalk the abandoned catacombs of the Old Kingdom, searching crevices, brambles and mushroom thickets. Caves, caverns and peat bogs! There is an insult in that."

"Mistress is always right. Yes. Yes. _Yes."_ The Grublin wrung his spindly little green claws together maniacally, a fit of horrid hacks blaring from the honeycomb of black-welts that were ripped in his moss-flesh in absence of a functioning mouth. Cynder flinched at her perfect atmosphere being broken, and considered throwing her Orderly over the railing. "But the Dark One foresees all! _All_ things even beneath light and earth! Gigaw not lie when say; Mistress follows most righteous of deeds."

"_Mana Crystal._" Cynder muttered. "Once, this whole landscape was covered in it. Now it is hidden underneath the foul earth."

"Mistress _smarter_ than earth..." Gigaw giggled, pointing to her quarters and study nearby, where on one of the tables not taken up by scrolls and books, sat an alchemy rig, fitted with mortars and pestles, beakers and calcinators. "Mistress make earth go boom!"

"Yes, it's quite the spectacle when push comes to shove." Cynder hummed. "We have enough of the black powder to produce enough explosives to level this whole fetid swamp. Rapturously does that power obey me and it is _delicious~._"

Cynder licked her muzzle, almost moaning the end of her own statement out. Her long and thick tail lashed like a whip behind her, its bladed tip singing like a finely tuned katana in the air. She was prone to episodes of excitability, even out here, in the lowest station she'd ever been given.

All for a pile of _rocks. _Mana Crystals were the lifeblood of the draconic youth, as they were necessary to replenish the elemental power of drakes and dragonesses who were still learning to master their own biologies. The gems grew where the dragons were most numerous. Thousands of them had been left behind after the south had been abandoned.

Cynder's Apes had been gradually depleting the underways and crevices of the marshes for the last month, and before that, even more months of preparation had gone into preparing the ancient dragon tower as a garrison.

Once gathered, the gems were refined all the quicker at her Mistress' home, the Dark Continent, and were bled into the earth, where terrible pacts of shadow-energy could be imbued into the magical drainage and used to create battalions of monsters.

Such replacements were needed for the Northern Front, against the dredges of the Dragon Realms, the _New Kingdom,_ as some were calling it.

"Soon, Mistress' gaze not just preside over Funguswood." Gigaw chattered, hiking up on his talons to point over the railing. "_See?_ Soon, all dragon monuments look like _that._"

He gestured to a rounded patch of dark color far off to the north, where the chin of the great Frontier Sea was just visible. The ruins of the ancient dragon fortress, Stormwatch, stood lonely on the coast.

"Nobody alive today had the satisfaction of rendering _that._" Cynder eyed the distant ruins with boredom. "And I don't recall asking for you to speak."

"Apologies, Mistress, apologies..."

"But, you are not wrong. Come along, Orderly." Cynder turned and began to trot back inside the observatory lounge. "Guard," She called across the floor. One of two white-furred, black-armored Apes with rigid expressions written on their mugs grunted, and bowed to her as she approached. "you may open the door, I'm on my way to deal with the news."

The doorway swung open and the Ape sentries- two members of Cynder's personal Cold Legion -stood on either side to allow her through. One of them growled at Gigaw as the Grublin scurried along Cynder's flank. Gigaw sounded like a little misbehaving purse dog with a returned gesture, snapping at the larger simian.

Cynder and Gigaw passed through an arch that wound deeper into the recesses of the tower's upper limits. The gothic architecture here was wounded and wrought with vines, acting as the central spine of the tower that led all the way down to the atrium chamber making Forlorn's foundation. It was over forty stories of steps. Cynder liked trekking the chute: as it gave her time to think, normally alone.

Gigaw, on the other hand...

"_-Eek~! Nasty, nasty!_" Gigaw chattled. His foot caught on one of the creepers overgrowing the steps. and he kicked and hopped madly until he was free of it.

"This tower was built almost four thousand years ago by ancient dragons hailing from Stormwatch." Cynder mused, stepping through sheet after sheet of dull daylight spilling through the ruined stained-glass windows layering down the tower's stairwell chute. "It was made to be a sentry and staging point for explorers founding their dens farthest from the Realms. Once upon a time, this swamp was rife with magical spirit-plants and ancient groves. Sentient stags guarded the woods and unicorns fed in the clearings.

"Dragons from the urban centers would come here to festoon their alchemical reserves with samples of the most exotic and rarest kinds. Hedgewizards and mages wrote the contents of some of the most renowned spellbooks and chemical tomes using material and wisdom that they found coming here. The Southern Marshes were, in essence, an extension of the Old Kingdom."

"Gigaw know this." The Grublin defended. His foot caught on another vine and he tumbled with a hideous shriek that echoed throughout the chute. His face met the brick with a muted _thmp~! _Gigaw laid there for a moment before scrabbling back up. "Gigaw aware to _some extent..._"

"Did my Mistress lecture you on nothing before sending you to me?" Cynder asked.

"The Dark Mistress... _prepare_ Gigaw, as she see fit." Gigaw defended, talking in an almost calculated measure. "Gigaw grown from first-generation beneath Island Catacombs. One of the _Oldies._ Gigaw there when Dark Mistress roused the Magma Beast with terrible songs and binding chains of magick. Gigaw there when Dark Mistress presumed over you_,_ ...ehm, _Mistress_."

Cynder's scales bristled at that. She snarled at Gigaw, reminding him that despite his older age, he was still a lowly _whelp._ She could crush him like a gnat when she fancied it.

_Miniscule wort-creature._

Gigaw produced an obscene and disgusting chirp, his red eyes flaring. It was a sound his kind made when they were sounding their own alarm, kind of like how a rat couldn't help itself from squealing when someone attempted to step on it.

He carefully reoriented the subject.

"Gigaw only make known this. Gigaw have knowledge that can be best used by Mistress to further _Mistress'_ goals, and Mistress' goals only. Gigaw is humble servant. Lowly Orderly, at beck and call."

"And what a humble minion you have proven to be." Cynder hummed, her hips swaying in glee as the steps passed without trouble beneath her athletic legs. "Surely, you would not be burdened by accompanying me to inspect the fruits of my command?"

"Certainly not, Mistress," The Grublin stumbled over a crack sheepishly. The chute was torture for him and Cynder was delighted by it. "Gigaw live to serve."

* * *

{🐉}

The healthy clink of pickaxes meeting stone rang prevalently even in the bailey section of the tower.

Here, the sprawling ruins of a cathedral-like fortification nested in the fallen ribcages of pillars and merlon rows. The smashed painted-glass frames rounding the atrium were overgrown with colossal mushrooms and strung with wooden scaffolding. Boilers built into the remnants of ancient sarcophagi tombs churned hellish magma that vented soot through nailed-in chimney chutes, ones bursting sporadically from the tower's basing archways and the dome that the actual spire itself sprouted from.

There were murder slots overlooking the Funguswood and the moss-plateaus that the Forlorn Watch was built atop. Stinking, furred warriors bedecked in roundel plate, chainmail, leather and bonded rags lumbered to and fro wielding poorly made bows and spears. They scowled behind tusked underbites and tribal masks spattered with haphazard dyes and paints, communicating through a series of whoops, grunts and howls.

_Apes._

Possibly the one thing in abundance here that stunk worse to Cynder than the mushrooms.

Cynder snorted on her brooch again as she and Gigaw ended their trip down the stairwell. The scream of machinery blended with pickaxes, hammers and the strike of swords as Apes practice-dueled one another in makeshift debris arenas. They squabbled among campsites erected from animal fur tents and huts made from the dirtied bones of large swamp-herbivores.

The base of Forlorn extended to a diameter of around two hundred feet. Cynder's army had converted what had once been the skeleton of a library and a series of dragon tombs into a small industrial park and camp. The Apes were constantly busy assembling crude machines of war, weapons, and hauling Mana Crystals that they harvested from the swamps.

"The Dark Lady approaches!" –Trumpeted one of the burly primates. As Cynder trotted closer, squeaking hand-carts tugged by giant Anteaters and their Ape handlers finished their trundling trek into the center of the atrium. There was a convoy of six of them, and each of their opened, wooden holds was crammed with mountains of thick, glowing green gems. The Anteaters snorted tiredly and whipped the air with their snouts. Some Apes ran up with fistfuls of black insects and began to gently coax them onto the beasts' tongues as they greedily bent down to slurp them up.

"Mistress Cynder, the gems! The gems for you!" A larger officer named Gruluk, came as close as his cowardly nature would allow himself to get to the mighty dragon. He fell to his knees, grinning at her with rows of sharp, yellow fangs. His work teams followed suit, bowing and howling off cries of- '_Oo-Ah~!' _–as they practically ate the dirt and cobble. "Great Fire Powder work! It work! Just as the Mistress' indefatigable, unsurpassed, and great wisdom knew it-"

"Oh, your ministrations bore me, lieutenant." Cynder swatted the Ape out of her way like he weighed no more than a sheet of paper.

Gruluk whooped loudly as he sailed away and plowed into a steaming stew-pot that some of the other monkeys had erected on the edge of the exchange. Scalding stew splattered everywhere and the pot flipped end over end, sending its ring of tenders scattering with panicked drawls and yips.

"You there, where did you acquire such a bounty of Mana gems? It couldn't have been close to the Watch. We've drained all the caves within a mile radius." Cynder pointed with the blade of her tail.

The aforementioned Ape shivered like a babe in the wind. Some of his fellows turned from their rapid bowing, whooping, punching and shoving him to the front of the ranks. He fell to his knees before the dragoness, terrified and breathing in quick rasps.

"Aye, Mistress, we're comin back from the southern edge, just at the end of the fungus forest." This Ape was much more blunt in his words, and Cynder liked that. "The boom-sticks revealed a great cave chamba beneath the bogs. It's packed silly wit hundreds of towers of them Mana Crystals!"

"_Hundreds?"_ Cynder smiled, taking the Ape's stupidity for granted. Nearby, Gigaw trailed by her tail, hissing when one of the Apes curiously stepped closer and made to poke one of his puss-leaking mouth holes. "The crystal reserves we've discovered thus far have been minute and spread thinly. You're telling me that you've found a single pocket that filled all of these carts?"

"And still more." The Ape nodded, keeping his fear-soaked eyes on the dirt. "Me and the lads are unda orders from Chieftain Visigoth imself. He's the one found da chamber and stayed behind ta safeguard it."

"_Really?_" Gigaw chattered with interest, backing down when Cynder appraised him disapprovingly under her snout. "_Apologies...Apologies..._"

"It's the chief's words I'm repeatin, Mistress, not me own." The Ape gulped.

"_Hundreds._" Cynder had a slight glaze in her white eyes for a moment. She shook it away and preened her bladed wings. "A trove like what you are describing is enough to produce an entire Legion of my Mistress' prodigy. Speak with certainty to me."

"We _all_ can attest to it! Ain't dat rite _lads?_" The Ape turned slightly, smugly dragging the rest of his comrades in on the chopping block they had so eagerly laid him upon. Many of the work crew nodded their ugly heads enthusiastically. "Chieftain Visigoth has unearthed a bloody hoard."

A moment of silence impregnated the scene. Gigaw wandered closer, gazing at the dragoness patiently.

Cynder, for her part was caught in a strange limbo. On one claw, she wasn't entirely convinced. But then again… Visigoth was more competent than this entire tribe of numbskulled, shit-flinging primates combined. He was Chieftain for a reason, even if old age was beginning to catch up to him.

"We shall see." She finally decreed, looking down at Gigaw. "I am taking flight for the south. Work the slaves on double shifts. This amount of crystal will need to be processed in ten times less the hours. If any of them resist, deny them food. If they continue to resist, kill one of them. Work them to death if you need to."

"_Yes, Mistress. _Of course, Mistress." Gigaw bowed repeatedly as Cynder trotted past him. "Gigaw lives to serve."

Cynder trekked out on the ruined flight of what once were stairs that led into the yawning gates of the Forlorn Watch's bailey. The stairs had long been ground to dust and sloped to form a ramp for the wagon trains. The ruined gates themselves- laden with Ape tribal totems and markings –were swung wide open, letting in a blinding cascade of daylight from the gray sky above.

Cynder stepped into the arch and swept her gaze disapprovingly over the Forbidden Funguswood around her. She snorted, and leathery creaks sounded throughout the air as she rolled her petite shoulders. Sinews of muscle broiled beneath her onyx coat. Membranes of red extended farther and farther from the stilted limbs protruding behind her scapulas.

Her wings were five times the size of the rest of her body mass. They were almost bat-like, and worn from years of good usage. Cynder stretched the membranes, twisted her neck, and gave them a good flap.

**_Fwwhmmm~! _**–a whirlwind of dust kicked up around her. A trio of Apes that had been lumbering nearby were swept off their feet and flew over the side of the ramp, hollering and shrieking. One of the gem carts inside threatened to overturn, and the giant Anteater at its reigns mewled in panic. Cynder opened her jaws and released a terrible roar that echoed throughout the swamps.

The Cloud Ripper sped for her charge.

* * *

{🐉}


	5. Chapter 4 - Out with a Bang

**Dragon(s)layer**

**4**

* * *

**Out with a Bang**

* * *

_**{Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Soundtrack: Dungeon Theme 3}**_

* * *

"_Ouch._"

Spyra grit her fangs and retracted her paw tenderly. She'd stepped right on a bog urchin. The drab-colored ball of needles was sticking to her pads, impaled in the softer undersides of her scales. When she leaned closer to grimace at the little creature, its spines started to shiver and a low, pebble-like growl rose from inside it.

"You gotta' be kidding me."

Scraping the urchin off on a log, Spyra rubbed her paw and limped over a few rock rises.

**_Bmmmmm~! _**–rumbled another explosion. The ground quaked, and stagnant, yellowed water rippled. Bats squeaked as they were dislodged from their roost somewhere in an overhead swamp tree. Spyra jumped inside her own scales again and scrambled for cover behind a stack of giant mushrooms.

_Damn it._

She was as jumpy as a field mouse. _Her_ of all dragons.

_C'mon, Spyra, get it together! You're not scared of _anything_ in this whole swamp! You know it like the back of your paw, for Ancestors' sake…_

Humming angrily, Spyra's purple eyes locked on a patch of clearing just ahead of her in the overwhelming marshland brush. The earth rose there in muddy swells and veins. Entangled brambles scabbed at the edges of an almost mourning trench. Green smog billowed softly from the cave entrance. It was dark, and creeper vines hung like filthy hairs over its maw.

**_Bmmmmmm~! _**–Spyra yipped and ducked behind her mushroom when the cave entrance became lit with a glare of yellow. Dust fell from the archway, and some panicking bats fluttered out, vanishing in nearby willow trees.

_The explosions are coming from inside there._

She had a gut feeling about whatever this was. She had experienced similar phenomena to this in the past. Methane gas sometimes ignited in the many under chambers and fungus-cavities that networked under the marshes as miles of twisting root tunnels. Spyra had never been able to explore the tunnels as deeply as she had wanted to, after all, going down there entailed the threat of things much _much_ worse than Toadworts and Giant Mosquitos.

All kinds of ugly, larger and dangerous carnivores and scavengers lurked down there. Spyra had seen some scary things in those pits. But something told her that what she was seeing right now wasn't as mundane as _methane_.

Spyra used her teeth to pull an urchin barb from her claw, spitting it out and slipping around the mushrooms. Being this deep into the edge of the Forbidden Funguswood, the northern sky was shrouded in a rising wall of mushrooms the size of trees that were all over the hill of the cave's mouth. Some mushrooms bigger than cows speckled the muddy earth between her and her goal.

_Nobody home will ever know. Keep your belly to the ground. Hips wide, forelegs wide and forward, and head low. Tail for balance… Tail for balance…_

Spyra was giddy as she crept up to the cave, sliding across the marshy, dingy terrain like a salamander, or a snake. She'd been around enough of the fauna here long enough to learn from them, after all. Smooth and silent always got the drop.

The smog burping from inside the cavern stunk like hell. Spyra had to breathe through her mouth as she reached the cave's entrance and climbed up one of the mud veins. Being dirty didn't bother her. She _liked_ it when the getting's were rough.

Smiling, with brown goop staining her beautiful purple coat up to her elbows and shins, Spyra gave her wings a little kick, and hopped into the throat of the cave, landing inside with a quiet _squick~! _–on the mud-plain within.

**_Bannnngggg~!_**

-The explosions were more defined now, less muffled. Her eyes dilated when the entire chamber lit yellow for just a split second. It highlighted the ceiling, and what she saw in those moments made her blood run like ice water.

Thousands of little eyes were looking back at her, some of them blinking out of existence occasionally or shifting. Her and the colony of alien creatures shared a prolonged moment of silence, them gazing at her squarely, her craning her head to meet their scrutiny. Spyra's vision gradually broke down and digested the dark. Bats. Lots and lots of bats. Evidently, the majority of the flock had decided that they weren't going to be chased out of their home due to the meddling of some fire.

**_Bannnnggg~!_**

-Some wings fluttered. Maybe a handful took off outside the cave. The rest jittered in their upside-down stances, teetering, like ornaments caught in a momentary breeze. A pebble bounced off Spyra's snout and she growled, making another flight of bats whisk outside for safety.

"Winged rats." She murmured. One of them shrieked at her. She spat an ember in the mud and kept going deeper.

Ghoulish methane-smog wormed from the root-straddled earth. Spyra made a mental note as she climbed through the stinking mess to keep her fire breath under control. No more ember-spitting. All it took was a spark and this whole tunnel would light up like a bomb.

But then, how were those explosions happening without setting off the methane pockets?

"-_Come on~! Set up the Black Powder and get away from there!_" –Hollered a guttural, raspy voice.

"_The fuse isn't lit! ...There! Dat's much better…_"

**Thwock~! **–went the report of an object bouncing off the second speaker's head. The victim howled in pain and whined.

"_You idiot! Now look at what yu did-_"

**_Bannnnngggg~! _**–the tunnel rattled. The screech of crackling shrapnel and the panicked cries of individuals who had been thrown off their feet echoed everywhere.

Spyra flinched when a glowing, green chunk of rock smacked right into the center of the tunnel ahead. It planted into the dirt from above, steaming with still fresh soot that leaked off of it.

_"A Mana Crystal…._" The dragoness gasped, hiding behind some squat mushrooms as she peered at the strange, pulsating stone. Mana Crystals were said by the dragonflies of her village to be quite dangerous, like Toadworts or Red-Cap Mushrooms. Spyra had always kept her distance from the things because of those worries.

"It fell down there!"

She jumped inside her scales and hunkered lower. Heavy footfalls clunked down a rampart of cave-dirt, revealing two lumbering creatures covered head to toe in bristling, unkempt fur. Spyra felt her heart leap into her throat.

"Dere it is! Rite where I said it would be…" One of the monsters cackled. "Black Powdeh always has the drop on stone an earth. See? And yu said I was crazy."

"You _ar_ crazy, yu moron. You blew up our guys!" The other berated. "Rak, Glops and Shal! All of 'em are nevva gonna' see the light of day 'cause uv you and yer stupid fuse."

"Less mouths ta dribble and drool over the roast haunches bak at home…"

"I never said I was complainin. But yer still an idiot."

What the hell were these things? They were ugly as sin! Fat, blubbery, with limbs wrapped in chords of bulbous muscle and blanketed with scabby fur that was the color of dirty smoke. They had glowing yellow eyes and hideous underbites. And they _stunk._ Spyra actually gagged when their displeasing aroma began to waft through the already noxious methane plumes taking up the tunnelway she hid in.

"Did yu ere something?" The first asked as he bent over the Mana Crystal.

"Maybe it's them ghosts some of the lads are always gettin on about." The other waved a dirty paw and gripped the underside of the gem, heaving with the solid weight. "-_Gah~! _I fink I might slip a disk! _Get ovva here and help me with this! Or I'll pound ya'!_"

_Monkeys._ They were primates, with drooping noses and exposed, pink buttcheeks. Spyra cocked her head as the second Ape wrapped his arms under the gem too and hauled it out of the dirt with a grunt. **_Ftt~! _**–a blast of green dust farted out from its unwashed arse'. It giggled and the other one rolled his eyes.

"-_You were just waiting for that, you stinkin' chimp._"

"_-Ooooo-hah-hah~!_"

Fascinated, the dragon observed the pair trundle back with the gem. Neither of them seemed too impacted, laying their grubby hands all over a supposedly '_dangerous' _item. Spyra narrowed her eyes and remembered to scoff her parents about it if she made it out of here alive.

A pair of crude, iron maces hung from straps over the Apes' two belts. They clinked against the leather and chainmail hanging in skirts over their knees. These people meant business.

"_Put it with the rest of em…_"

"_Stop pullin fleas out of my coat! …. At least not dere, get dis leg, this one's completely infested._"

"_Fire in the hole!_"

**_Bannnnnggg~! _**–everything up ahead was a ruckus of busied work and rushing voices. Spyra snuck up to a boulder and hid, scanning a wide antechamber that rose in a plateau in the center of a larger chamber.

There were tens of these Apes wandering around a dig site. Tents, weapon racks and stacks of crudely made boxes cluttered the outskirts of the base. The steaming remains of blast craters marred the earth in the center of the encampment and a series of rents wrought into the stone wall on the far side of the chamber. Pull-carts with giant Anteaters strung up to their fronts were stocked with glowing piles of Mana Gems. Pickaxes fell and hammers cracked. There were teams of Apes viciously battling rises of dirt and rocks at the bases of beautiful spire formations of Mana Crystals. The crystals sang sharply each time the Apes missed a swing and ate into their once pristine faces. Work teams scrambled about the feet of larger warriors to collect every shard that kicked off the gems and scattered on the ground.

Nearby, a smaller Ape tried to steal a canteen strapped to a larger's belt. The latter responded by grabbing over his aggressor's throat, decking him between the eyes and kicking his twitching form over a mud ridge.

"-Fire in the hole!"

Spyra whipped her head over to see a cluster of gems (and an unfortunate worker who hadn't had the intelligence or hearing left to heed the warning) vanish in a burst of flame and black soot. Glowing shards landed everywhere as Apes scrambled into the smoke to collect them excitedly.

A pile of barrels nearby was the source of those explosions. Sticks of red-colored material were piled inside to their brims. Every now and then, an Ape ran over and snatched a stick or two, carrying them to the most troublesome of gem clusters that they couldn't dig out with tools.

_Holy frijoles, what have I found today? _Spyra thought, clawing the edge of her rocky hiding place to watch with wide eyes. In all her years in the swamps, she'd never seen anything like these creatures before. Where did these Apes come from? And what did they want with the gems?

A shard of crystal landed just ahead of her hiding place after another explosion racked the far northern side of the chamber. It winked at her when it finally bounced to a stop in the dirt. It was completely unblemished, despite the soot, the soil and the cracks running along its edges. Spyra's purple eyes reflected its sickly shade.

Something inside her was just begging her to reach out and touch it. So, risking discovery, that was exactly what the young dragoness attempted to do. Her quivering claw extended as far as it could reach in her bid to palm the gem into her pads.

Right as her talons were about to make contact, a strange surge of sensations started bubbling up in the flesh closest to the crystal. Spyra gasped as her blood boiled and her bones quivered. Even in just the tips of her paw fingers, she felt… _powerful._ She felt good.

"-_Work proceeds smoothly, my liege, as requested!_"

Spyra's draconic hearing perked and she ripped her arm away before she could touch the shard.

"Though, we've suffered some losses due to-"

**_Bannnggg~! _**–the ceiling of the chamber echoed with panicked shrieks. A duo of Apes with flaming asses and blackened fur went flying in two different directions, hitting the ground hard amid raining chunks of crystal.

"…_overeagerness._" –Concluded the nearby speaker. Spyra saw a portly Ape with a monocle over his eye waddle out from the nearby fur tents. The creature sighed. "Cheerio, that it isn't of any significance. All in the name of progress must be slow and arduous when need be, I say."

"Your words never lack wisdom, Tinker." –Came a much deeper, more imposing voice. Spyra stopped breathing when the largest Ape in the entire mob became visible beside the squatter Tinker.

This Ape stood over eight feet tall. His shoulders were unnaturally broad and his fur ragged and heavy, colored a deep navy blue with gray ridges and plumes. A mane of deep blue hair ran from the base of his barreled neck to the tip of his tiny tail. He was positively awash in muscle, freakishly so, looking as though he possessed the strength to crack boulders just by clenching them in his big, leathery, black fingers.

Animal pelts decorated his back, held in place by a pair of snarling shoulder pauldrons that were shaped curiously, almost arrowhead-ish, and layered with elegant scripture. It was obvious that his kind hadn't sculpted the fine pieces. Roundel wood shields belted to his chest plated over a skirt of chainmail, and two haggard war axes hung from straps on his narrow hips, their butts made from the cleaned, shrunken skulls of deer.

"They don't, I know." Tinker adjusted his monocle. "For a moment though, envision the possibilities…"

"Go on."

"Behold," Tinker gestured to a nearby worker jamming his finger up his nose and twisting to get a good hook on a particularly troublesome booger. "the _Ape,_ Chieftain Visigoth. A race who is not troubled by the more intricate priorities of the rest of the burgeoning world."

"Quite." Visigoth rumbled deep laughter.

"We weren't meant to grasp the evolutionary chain, clawing for the ends of all deals and scraps. That is where the _Mana Crystal_ comes into play. It's form, its physique! And most of all, its _power._" Tinker salivated. "The Dark Mistress truly is generous to let _us_ reap those benefits. Our lesser Mistress can't see it, but I can. I can see it very, very clearly. ….- _oh,_ and don't… don't tell her that last bit."

"Your secrets are safe with me." Visigoth scanned the dig site. "This is _our_ vision, Tinker."

"Right." Tinker grinned, clearing his throat uncomfortably. "I couldn't ever diminish another intellectual. Though I'd be damned if all this Black Powder isn't clogging my ear canals _and_ my sinuses. I'll be smelling brimstone for a month."

"Sacrifices." Visigoth shrugged his massive shoulders, his pauldrons creaking. "That is one problem solved. If only the Cloud Ripper could curtail the lack of cesspits." –The warlord sounded dismissive, snorting, as a terrible scent began to waft from the edges of the camp. "Prepare your things and get ready to leave."

"Will she not arrive shortly herself?"

"To prove _what?_" Visigoth grumbled. "That my finds are not lies and treachery? Ever since I stole her from that wretched shrine, she keeps finding more and more creative ways to patronize me and stick her snout in my affairs. _I_ will gain good standing with the Dark One through this haul. This is the most of the gem we have discovered in one place in this entire swamp. The slave pits need refilling and the Dark Mistress armies need reinforcements. The gems will do nicely."

"The _dragonflies_ will suffice for the prior! Oh, _jolly good!_" Tinker hopped and clapped his prehensile feet together like they were a pair of subsidiary hands. "This calls for a shot of _champagne _and crumpets!"

"Your time in the North has changed you." Visigoth observed as the two lumbered back into the tents. "These words are alien to me."

"_That_ is even more of a decadent chance for me, my chieftain! There is no greater satisfaction than introducing a clean pallet to the joys of finer brews!" Tinker sang. "-Once we enslave the New Kingdom, I must acquire for you a plantation facility with doubly the moles to staff and bring you drinks of your choice."

Nearby, Spyra held her breath and sank behind the boulders, her eyes wild and darting. Her mind was battling with a strange conflagration of emotion. On one hand, her excitement and her naivety had been curtailed. What was an adventure when such risk became reality?

Slaves? A _Cloud Ripper?_ And they wanted to hurt the dragonflies. Her village. Her only home in this stinking marsh.

"I have to get out of here." She whispered, looking around at the distant explosions and the rushing teams of Ape warriors.

"_Oi! _You lot missed a shard!"

Spyra flinched and backpedaled from the rocks. A horrible smelling Ape ran over just in front of her hiding place and picked up the Mana Crystal shard lying there, waving it over his narrow head like it was a trophy.

"You're gettin' sloppier with each blow-up, Juluk! Don't tell me _that_ many rocks bounced upside yer fat head!"

"_Keep flapping your gums over there, and I'll eat your fuckin' children!_"

Panicked, Spyra forgot all about her rules for good stealth. She didn't keep her belly to the mud as she bounded like a gazelle back towards the way she had come, splashing through puddles and ripping through creepers in her bid for escape.

Suddenly, her front paws slipped.

_Shit._

**_Splat~! _**–she face-planted in the mud, her vision blinded by damp murkiness, and her snout invaded by a terrible, and bitter-tasting cold sludge.

Spyra groaned and leaned back, spitting and hacking as she batted madly about her snout.

"Hold on dere just _hold on! …._I gotta' take a leakage, boys."

"_Not again, Jesper!_"

"_You fat piss-bag! Half this bloody cave's flooded with your shite, and I know it!_"

Spyra shook herself like a dog, whipping herself back and forth until her vision cleared up. Unfortunately, it was just in time for her to glance in terror over the joint of her wing.

Standing right over the boulders she'd just vacated was one of the Apes. He was _huge_ compared to her. Seven feet tall. A whole three or four heads over her own, and his reflective, golden eyes were locked right on her.

The Ape lowered his paws from where he'd been fiddling with a belt on his waist. His arms hung almost as limp as his jaw as he struggled to process what he was seeing.

"Bloody hell." –Was all he uttered out.

Spyra blinked and did what came as reaction.

Her talon swiped across the mud, and she flung her wrist, hitting the Ape in the face with a rock.

**_Bnk~! _**–it bounced off right between his eyes.

"-_Ouch~!_" He cried, tumbling over the rocks and collapsing, clawing at his face. Spyra turned tail and sprinted.

Behind her, panicked cries and rallying shouts echoed down the tunnelway. Apes whooped and hollered. She heard the one she'd escaped ranting and cursing.

"-_That fing nearly took out my eye!_"

"_Lads?_"

"_What jus happened?_"

"_It was a trick of the light!_"

**_Thwack-~! _**–one of them punched the last speaker. "_It ain't a light-trick, it's an intruder, you orangutan._"

"_Does this mean we should tell the chieftain?_"

"_YES!_"

Spyra heaved and spat mud from her chops. War whoops echoed and joined together in a terrifying cacophony inside the cave's bowels. Footfalls started to flood down the mud and soil. She flicked her tail and ran faster, bounding on all fours with abandon.

Light bloomed in her face, and the bats overhead fluttered into the daylight outside in a rush. No sooner had their shrieks and fluttering wings grown silent did she leap over the cave's chin and land in the clearing outside.

Spyra whipped her head around, trying to remember her way back to the village.

Then, the air whooshed.

**_Pc-chhhhhh~! _**–the ground trembled and a breeze of dust kicked in her face. Spyra reared on her hind legs like a panicked horse, flaring her wings and coughing as the dust temporarily blinded her.

"-_Agh~! Damn it!_" She sputtered, landing on her pads and batting at her dirty face again. "_I knew my brother was right to hate mud so much!_"

"_Oh my~._" –Hummed a honeyed, very deep voice just ahead of her. Spyra froze and gazed up in horror, suddenly realizing that something was blotting out the sun. "Look at you, you lost, poor little hatchling."

Spyra stepped back as Cynder's ghostly pale eyes flared in amusement.

"You are quite far from home." Cynder trotted closer, decorating the air with a metallic swipe as her talons unsheathed from her front paws. "What might your name be?"

The sound of Apes rushing down the tunnel. Spyra felt her mouth go dry as she looked desperately between the cave and the colossal, black thing that was approaching her.

She was trapped.

* * *

{🐉}


	6. Chapter 5 - Fire from the Sky

**Dragon(s)layer**

**5**

* * *

**Fire from the Sky**

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Swamp Tense}**_

* * *

Once, when Spyra had been fresh from the egg, she had fallen into a sinkhole. She had been prowling the marshes. It had been one of her first times too. In all her eagerness to explore she had never even noticed the earth in front of her slipping away into a cavernous, black, mushy crevice until she was sliding down its dirty throat.

When she had landed, it had taken her a day to claw and swim through all the muck to get to safety. She wound up getting sick for over two weeks afterward, all the while getting scolded by her terrified parents.

_Be more careful._ -They said.

_Stay away from the unknown. It's dangerous! -_They said.

Why the hell didn't she just swallow her pride and listen?

This reminded her of the sinkhole. It reminded her of the feeling of being trapped. The inky, disgusting sludge crawling over her scales, submerging her toes, her ankles and her calves. The taste of wet dirt on her muzzle and the smell of methane, the walls literally running with horrible slop that kept caving in on her as she desperately clawed and crawled for salvation.

_Hopelessness._

Spyra had really done it this time. And all in the presence of this… this _thing…_

_Dragon,_ she realized, blinking away the dirt clogging her eyes and spitting rinds from her teeth. _Drago_ness, _like me._

Spyra was right in that regard. The larger, black, crimson bellied dragon _was_ like her in many respects, but only the most blatant of ones.

Aside from that, the first real dragon Spyra had encountered (besides herself) was terrifying to behold, if not a little cowing.

Talons sharper than steel crunched through the earth, where they stuck out in quads from her black, crimson-padded toes. She had a tail tipped with what looked like the blade of a sword. It whistled through the swampy air as it whipped to and fro with predatory impatience. Soulless, white eyes glared back at her with a strangely intoxicating, yet horrible mixture of emotions. The black dragoness looked almost like she was about to start salivating, like Spyra was some delicious dish that had been left, freshly cooked and steaming on a platter before her.

But aside from all that jolly good stuff, she was positively _beautiful._

Spyra snorted as her eyes quickly danced over her larger form. She saw the magical runes decorating her snout, the silver armbands and the spiked choker sealing off the base of her regal, and sinuous neck. Her immense, blood red wings were each tipped with polished, serrated thorns that could skewer a boar in but a passing hit.

_She's… curvy. Stupidly curvy._

Spyra harrumphed- despite her peril –and turned her nose up a bit at the encroaching beastess, instantly deciding that she didn't like her regardless of anything. She was backed as far as she was willing to be backed to the mouth of the cave.

"…_Heellloooo~,_ is anyone quite home in there?" The black dragon's voice sounded like honey. It was sweet, and trumpety, like an instrument, quite a contrast for the more barbarically flavored assets adorning the fringes of her femininely erotic physique. "I see fire in your eyes. I must refrain from what I assumed earlier; you aren't lost. You _meant_ to come here."

"…Yeah, yeah it was kinda', something, a little, like that." Spyra snorted, casting a glare back at the cave as the massed shuffling of clawed feet, whooping throats and clattering weapons got louder. "So… what are you supposed to be? Some kind of dominatrix with a grunge fixation and bad people skills?"

"A _comedian._" Cynder chuckled, hunching lower- like a lion preparing to leap –her tail swiping joyously behind her. "As if I did not have enough of those plaguing my ranks."

"_Ranks? _Ah." Spyra shot her a cheap grin, nodding back at the ruckus as the Apes reached the neck of the cave mouth behind her. "Those dudes are yours, then. How do you deal with the smell?"

"I have my methods." Cynder craned her neck, and her brooch clinked quietly against its chains from her throat. Spyra eyed the little trinket. Again, something about the black dragon's body was just… _fixating._ Pornographic. That chain against her sleek chest was like a fetish. "Your confusion is troublesome to me. Didn't they tell you what you might find this far south from the City of Wings? We live in _Foreigncountry _here, hatchling. Warfang doesn't breed children who mewl before the slaughter, defenseless."

"I am _anything_ but defenseless, you stupid bitch."

Cynder snarled as the Apes came in a landslide from the cave. Some of them toppled over one another. They stepped on each other's toes, smacked blades and howled out warcries at the little purple dragon before the foot of their master.

However, a single brush of Cynder's tail was enough to stay them. Their prey was at the feet of the Cloud Ripper. There was not an Ape in the horde who was willing to challenge her for kills she claimed…

…all except one.

"_Mistress._" –Came a grumbling call.

Spyra turned around to reveal the huge chieftain she had seen before smacking and butting his way through the crowd of his lessers. The other Apes bowed out of his path, parting like tides of gray, filthy water.

Visigoth had his two wicked, huge axes in his dirty paws, and he kept them lazed on either side of his hips, his freakish, evil eyes locked on the smaller dragon between him and his master.

"Our appointment is belayed by an intruder." Visigoth sounded apologetic as he tore his eyes from Spyra and looked at Cynder. "Is this one for your claws or my blades?"

"_Make way, make way~! _By the fleas in our forefather's arseholes', you baboons go through so much effort to part for the Warlord, and not for your chief mechanic-" Tinker appeared, hobbling by Visigoth's side. He took one look at Spyra, and his little monocle dropped off his face. His jaw went slack. "…_Holy ancient monkeys._" He slapped a paw over his mouth.

"Control your engineer, chieftain." Cynder smiled. "He'll drool all over your feet."

"What is wrong with you?" Visigoth batted Tinker back and kicked his monocle after him like a dog fanning its own recently laid shit. He pointed an axe at Spyra. "This one has seen the dig. We cannot let it get back to Warfang and reveal our plans."

"Oh no, my dear chieftain, this little girl is not from Warfang." Cynder shook her head.

"_Warfang?_ You're all from Warfang?" Spyra took a step towards the Apes, but flinched back, bearing her teeth, when two of the larger ones put themselves between her and their chieftain, brandishing crude spears with blood-red strips waving in the wind from their hafts. "_Ease off, buds,_ it was a simple yes or no I needed."

"How rebellious." Cynder licked her teeth. "I still have not had my questions answered. All dragons have a title, even ones ignorant to the world. Lonesome one, your name?"

"Spyra. Spyra the dragon." Spyra glared over her wing joint. "How about we diffuse this tense-stuff a little bit and find an agreement."

"_Oho~._" Cynder elated. "That's chippy and cute."

"Let me finish." Spyra licked her chops, her purple eyes darting between the two walls blocking her paths. Briefly, her wings twitched and she considered trying to fly away. But all the throwing spears the Apes had, and the speed of this black dragoness, made her think better on it.

_Just bide your time._

"One question and answer for another. I'm Spyra, and methinks I found something I wasn't supposed to see… So whaddya' say we all put the stabby bits down and talk things out for a second?" She said.

"At least she isn't dumb like a brick." Visigoth shrugged his pauldrons. Spyra's temper flared.

"_And_, at least I don't smell like someone lit a bag of shit on fire and doused it in their own urine." Spyra chipped the massive chieftain a sharp grin, fearlessly, despite his towering bulk. "I bet your mom bawled when she crapped your flea-bitten tookus out, huh?"

Visigoth's face lit up in a seething expression of rage. He grabbed one of his impromptu guards and shoved him from his path, stepping forwards and clasping his axes.

"_Ah-ah-ah~._" All attention went on Cynder. The black dragoness waved a paw, stifling her own amusement with a palm to the tip of her long snout. "This one amuses me, Chieftain, stay your hand. You have the strength. Spare me a moment."

"But, Mistress, she dishonors me before-"

"_Stand down, Visigoth._"

Visigoth huffed through his tusks and stepped backward, growling under his breath as he stared daggers at the smart-mouthed purple dragon.

_I will have your blood,_ his face told her. Spyra smirked and wiggled her hips at him, kicking dirt with her hind paw before turning back to Cynder.

"Rough crowd you have here." She commented.

"You must understand how difficult it is to find a decent conversation in these cesspools we have to the south." Cynder relaxed her pose a little and eyed the smaller female with interest. "It is all toil, dirt and _mushrooms._" She shuddered. "_Spyra,_ your unannounced company is bittersweet. You've got some energy in your words that I find highly entertaining. But that temper..."

"Somethin' you don't know the half of!" Spyra posed proudly, spreading out her paws. When Cynder took a step forwards, Spyra opened her jaws, and a brief torrent of broiling flame belched from the back of her throat and past her teeth, singing the earth and humus right before Cynder's toes. The black dragoness smiled, but didn't even flinch. "You stay right where I can see you, lady, don't you think buttering me up is going to get my guard down."

"_Perceptive_ too." Cynder relaxed, cocking her horned head. "You are full of surprises."

Before Spyra could react, a powerful claw gripped over her breast. The purple dragoness grit her fangs as she was swung through the air.

**_Crnnccchhh~! _**–fractured the muddy earth beneath her back. Cynder painfully compressed her wings underneath her as she slammed her into the ground, leaning her snout in closer to breathe a minty blast of carbon over Spyra's face.

"It pains me to kill the only thing worth even a sliver of my time in this swamp." Cynder clicked her tongue. Spyra began to cry out in pain as she compressed her talons. Some of the golden plates layering down her breast cracked under the immense pressure. They splintered, and their edges formed spider limbs. "Goodbye, Lonesome _Spyra._"

Spyra watched as Cynder opened her snout, crimson energy broiling in the back of her throat. It resembled fire, but it was the color of blood, and it glowed evilly, warbling and flexing like some kind of whirlpool made from red molasses.

Many others would've been helpless as the Cloud Ripper executed them without thought. Spyra, however, was in no mood to lay down and let some haughty goth-slut waltz in and kill her.

Wrenching her body in one deft wriggle, Spyra opened her own mouth, a tornado of living fire cascading from her throat. The flames resembled a gigantic sun-tentacle as they whipped over Cynder's face.

The black dragoness howled and reeled, leaping away as flames ignited her flesh and singed the interior of her throat. She was like a cat who had lost an eye, whirling around on all fours, shaking her head wildly as soot belched from her snout and muzzle.

Spyra's victory was short lived. She didn't even have a chance to pump one of her wings.

A racket of throaty yelps caught her attention. She spun around and gasped as a crudely carved axe blade descended with the intent to create an incision in her face. The Apes took the opportunity like a mob of foolhardy drunks, rushing her in a bounding mob of smaller warriors.

She ducked under the blow and rolled past the heels of an Ape, using moves and skills she'd developed hunting giant insects and badgers.

The Ape bellowed and twisted on a heel to meet her, but then Spyra shot up onto her feet, spun in mid air and brought the golden leaf of her powerful tail across his nose before he could swing at her again.

**_Crunch~! _**–went the Ape's nose. He howled and spun like a dreidle in the air before landing in a plume of dust.

Another Ape brought down a spear. She twisted around it and vaulted off her own heels, snarling as she shimmied up the haft and past the pommel like a snake slithering up a branch.

Spyra whipped past the Ape's face and dragged one of her wicked sets of talons across his eyes, gouging both of them with a syrupy eruption of deep crimson blood that fled down his cheeks and soiled the fur on his chin. The Ape screamed and lost his spear, rolling into the mud of the swamp floor and joining his comrade. His mewls of agony were cut short as the other soldiers trampled him in their craze to engage this new enemy.

Spyra dispatched another via a swipe across the chest and a backflip, her heels crunching his nose and knocking a canine-tusk loose. Her opponent choked on his own blood and was cast between the shoulders of two more assailants.

Axes, cleavers, shortswords and clubs arced, swept and dove in all kinds of angles. Spyra was quick, though. Years of navigating the swamps meant she was used to getting jumped by things like Giant Mosquitoes, bloodsucking nymphflies and Bulb Spiders, all of whom were fast-striking ambush predators with nasty bites.

Merely a quick dodge here, a shimmy to the left and a duck to the right, and everything became a procession to her. Spyra rolled, jumped, climbed, slashed, gored with her bronze horns and whipped with her tail. Apes flew in all kinds of directions, howling in pain, fright and confusion.

One of the furry warriors landed face-first in a hollowed stump with a meaty **_thnk~! _**His legs started kicking, echoing monkey-calls rolling out in a tirade as he cursed up a storm.

"_Enough!_" Visigoth hollered, stomping through the mob to attack her. "Leave the dragon to me!"

"_Yeah! _Yeah, leave the dragon to _you!_" Spyra parroted, glancing the flat of an axe with the length of her wing. Spyra's reactive uppercut caught the Ape in his throat. He danced away from her, hacking up his own lungs. Freed, she turned to face her newer opponent as he crushed swamp reeds, and batted aside vine draperies in his path to reach her. "I bet you have a lot of problems dumped on you all the time, what with being a chieftain of a tribe and lineage of cross-eyed dipshits who can't count to three."

"_Arrrgghhhh~!_" Visigoth brought one of his axes down on her, but he of course missed. Spyra was like liquid magenta around the blade. It impacted the dirt and she swam up the handle like a rat.

Visigoth gawked- slack-jawed -at her speed before Spyra latched onto his face like an angry cat.

"-_Eeeeeggghhh~!_" –Visigoth screeched femininely, dropping his axes and clawing at his head. Spyra dug her talons into his mane and wouldn't let go. "-_Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff~! Get. It. Off of me~!_"

"_Steady. Steady._" An eager Ape hauled back with a throwing spear, pinching an eye shut and biting his tongue. He tried to line up the weapon's head but struggled as Spyra crawled around Visigoth's large body like a cockroach. "Damn. Don't seem like I gots a prime shot, I don't."

"You got this, just aim for its fat, thorny head!" One of his fellows ran up beside him and cheered him on. "Oi'! I think the chief's winnin'!"

"-_I wonder what _this_ does?!_" Spyra cackled. There was a crunch of flesh, and Visigoth screamed so loudly that his own ears started to bleed. Spyra's tail eagerly wagged from her hiding spot underneath the Ape's lumbering arm. His fingers tore at his armor as he struggled to locate where the dragon zipped to every time he failed to grab her. "_You got a really cute little tail back here, bud'! It'd suck if someone _torched it!"

Fire erupted behind Visigoth's back. The Ape cried out as steam shot up from his backside and he flopped onto his huge chest, whimpering like an infant as he rolled back and forth on the dirt.

"-_Erm, _I don't think that's supposed to happen." The Ape beside the spearman uttered. "Stop drop and roll, sir! Yer bloody arse' is on fire!"

"_Steady…. Steady… and….-_" The spearman loosed his weapon with a glance of his arm.

"-You know, just as a head's up, you might wanna' think about investing in some bandages next time you turn up the _suck_." Spyra said as she sauntered off the Chieftain's prone back, his pained groans going ignored. Spyra glanced once over his back and giggled, her wings fluttering as she licked the back of her paw and sat felinely before Visigoth's jaw, which was eating mud. "_Oh man, _cowboy, you're gonna' need this."

Spyra stuck a rock in Visigoth's mouth_._

Just then, there was a crunching sound and a tear of leather. Visigoth's long face lost all color as a spear impaled his left arse' cheek, and stood proudly in the swampy air like a makeshift banner pole.

His teeth cracked as he bit down on the rock, some of the yellow shards bouncing off of Spyra's paws. She dusted them away, glancing around at the mob of defeated primates littering the earth.

"Alright, who's next?" She snarled.

All that answered her was a collection of coughs, groans and whimpers. Apes victimized by her speed writhed in agony all over the place. One or two of them might've been dead.

"Hey," She grinned. "Not half bad, if I don't say so myself."

The Apes had probably never stood a chance.

At least, _this_ group of them.

"_Get her!_" An officer cried, tens of more voices howling out to join his as another wave came at her.

"-_Shit!_" Spyra cut off her musings. One of them swung at her with an axe. "Maybe I didn't think this through."

Tens of Ape warriors jumped over the wounded to encircle her. She may have taken out the chief', but she hadn't dealt with even a quarter of the overall mob. Now, they were foaming at the mouths, howling, crying out in rage at the humiliation their powerful leader had suffered at the hands of this zippy, smart-tongued lizard.

But all of that was mitigated by a banshee's scream echoing across the swamp. Spyra looked up just in time to see a black shape descending on her from the heavens.

Cynder appeared, cracking the ground as her great mass drove her heels' weight into the humus-slicked earth between Spyra and the remaining Ape mob. She had leaped several feet across the battlefield.

_Wait a second, why does she still look pretty?! I burned her face off!_

Evidently, this wasn't quite true. Cynder's facial features were as pristine as they were before she had eaten a helping of purple-brand deluxe flame. There wasn't a scar, singe or crooked scale on her.

Cynder hummed and cracked a smile.

"You aren't the only spontaneous one around here." She chirped. "I'm impervious to magic. That means your elemental breath is no more dangerous to me than an errant afternoon breeze."

"No way! T-That's- _T__hat's cheating!_" Spyra gaped.

Suddenly, Cynder began to move, and Spyra couldn't do anything but desperately pull herself away from a blinding harry of talons aiming for her throat.

Cynder now had become wordless. Spyra's stunt had changed everything, and any small semblance of musing that the black dragoness might have possessed was now banished beneath an unrelenting tsunami of vicious, animalistic hatred. She was going to disembowel this little shit-dragoness and eat her still-beating heart.

_We shall see where your humor lies as I feast on your entrails! _The Cloud Ripper thought, bearing her fangs and swiping her tail, trying to trip Spyra. The latter leaped over the blow and tucked into a roll.

However, the Cloud Ripper wasn't having any more of a prolonged fight. A great blood-colored wing batted Spyra from the air, like a swatter to an errant fly.

She careened head over heels and smacked chest-first into the trunk of a willow tree, cracking the bark and sending fronds tumbling to the ground in hushed whispers.

Spyra compressed there, like a smashed bug, and then groaned and slid down the trunk, hushing onto the earth and falling with her wings splayed out. The purple dragon's eyes rolled in her head. She blinked, and watched- upside down –as Cynder bounded closer, snarling, with more crimson energy bubbling from inside her mouth.

_Oh boy._

Spyra grit her fangs and felt her heart bump into her breastplates. She scrabbled away and Cynder skewered the earth she abandoned, her claws dicing and interlocking, sending bands of soil and pebbles flying everywhere.

Spyra kicked her wings and glided right over the larger dragoness' hips. Her talons slashed out and drew crimson lines across Cynder's previously unblemished scales, the ones armoring the length of her elegant spine.

**_Slskk~! _**–flesh squelched and blood misted in the air. Cynder cried out.

"_Ha!_ You're just like that shag-rug with legs!" Spyra chortled, landing and prancing back from Cynder as her tail-blade slashed out in a near-miss. "Not so confident now!"

Cynder hissed. Her and Spyra sized one another up, their tails each whipping behind them.

_Stubby, tiny, ugly little tomboy,_ Cynder scowled inside her head, turning an eye past her shoulder, where blood trails ran like little glistening canals down her haunch from the claw wounds she'd suffered.

It had been a while since she'd discovered an opponent capable of bleeding her. It _excited_ the draconic commander. Cynder licked her teeth and flexed her wings. It was too long since a proper dragon had challenged her to a game of domination.

"Lonesome Spyra," Cynder dryly croaked, padding westward, where Spyra countered eastward, both of them beginning the slow process of circling. "I have underestimated your prowess."

"_You aren't the first._" Spyra mumbled, hunching lower, appearing much more tense than her opponent. The truth being; she _was_ . Spyra had never encountered anything that had survived more than a few twists and hits with her in melee. Toadworts, big bugs? None of those things were even comparable to the lightning-fast reflexes and indraconic strength of this black dragon. "Awkward, but you never returned the favor for me, ya' know? _Names?_"

"_Hmmmph~._" Cynder hummed, smiling as tens of Apes surrounded their invisible arena ring, silently watching in awe as the reptiles prepared to reengage. "Most of our kind do not suffer such ignorance, not knowing who I am. You really have no clue?"

"I'm not most of _our kind._" Spyra voiced her parenthesis.

The first dragon she finds, and it's trying to eat her. Today was just a grand ole' day, as it turned out.

"You stand before Cynder, Terror of the Skies in the North, Cloud Ripper of the South." Cynder bowed her head for emphasis. "_Woe betide you._ I am the Mistress of Forlorn, Lady of the Concurrent Shadowy Veil and Doom of the Westward. You stand claw-to-claw with a legend, hatchling."

"Anyone who has to specify what the fuck they are ain't totin' much, sister!" Spyra spat. "I can brag about a pair I don't have all day, none of it means jack unless I bleed whoever is listening."

"Aptly put." Cynder conceded with an angry huff. "What you lack in etiquette, you seem to at least moderately recover in philosophy."

"I have no idea what you just said, but screw you too."

"Can you not engage a worthy opponent in a civilized discussion? Not even for a fleeting moment?" Cynder feigned hurt, reclining her long neck. "All you appear to be capable of is insults, brash decisions, and unintelligent banter."

"It's all enough to get even your attention, _legend._" Spyra winked. "You wanna' get on with it?"

"Oh, most certainly." Cynder winked back. "Taste_ Fear._"

Spyra initially thought Cynder was screaming at her, but then, as the black dragon's mouth opened, and glowing, crimson mist spilled past the rinds of her jaw, she knew that something much more dangerous was occurring.

Cynder was using an element, just as she had, and it wasn't fire.

Crimson bouts of sloppy, liquid-like energy catapulted in spreading droves past Cynder's teeth. The almost intelligent plumes of broiling, screaming magic sailed in every direction, whisking about the swampy ground and the tall grass like a platoon of bloody will-o-wisps spreading out in a pack formation.

Spyra stumbled backward as every single roiling orb stabbed towards her in one fluid motion. The purple dragoness gasped as syrupy washes of coldness bathed her scales and sent chills rattling down to the deepest portions of her body.

Before her waking eyes, black shadows emerged from the whipping tornado of panic that became her vision. The ground had vanished, the trees and the sky were gone. Spyra was screaming, and all she could see was black: an endless, hungering pit of darkness that penned her in with its inky flesh.

Spyra was tumbling. She was tumbling through the air, head over heels, her wings ineffective, fire in her eyes and the light of heavens blinding her. Her nightmare from last night rewound itself in her mind like a film reel. She felt sick, and her throat burned as she voided the contents of her stomach and collapsed onto her belly.

She knew what Cynder was doing. It was _magic. _Unnatural power that the dragonflies only had limited understanding of and influence over.

Spyra had never seen such potent usage of it before. Once, in the past, dragonflies from another village along the coast overlooking the iceberg-riddled seas had come to her village seeking trade. Spyra had been a little whelp fresh from the egg. She had witnessed a dragonfly chieftain- one much like her father –use magic for the first time.

She had watched as the chieftain had picked up a dead flower from the edges of their hut, and before her eyes, in his chitinous fingers, the flower moved and lifted on its own accord.

It had transformed from a bleak black to a vibrant green, erecting on its stem, its petals blossoming from the previously dead, black pupil of its heart.

Spyra would've felt nostalgic if she actually had control over her own body. That memory was nothing right now. She couldn't do anything but wretch, and crawl, and tumble and flop all over herself.

This magic was not life-giving and pure. _This_ was the stuff of evil. It was Cynder's dreaded _Siren's Scream_. She was so stricken with overwhelming terror that she couldn't formulate any kind of words, not even curses. She could only scream and cry. So that's what she did.

_I want to go home._

Something hit her flank. The ground reappeared just in time for her to sprawl on her own ribcage.

Dizzy and confused, she whipped her head up at the reemerging sky to see Cynder's leering, black face grinning down at her. Her six, ivory-white horns were now stained at their very tips with a rich red. Spyra glanced down at herself and gasped at the ragged welts of opened flesh marking her right flank.

Cynder had gored her. Three ragged holes deeper than her knuckles were thickly trenched into her scaly flesh, rising and falling with her panicked breathing. Blood tumbled from them in squelching bouts, bringing pain so clear that she could taste it.

"I'm going to eat your eyes." Cynder gleefully told her.

Then, there was a crack of thunder.

**_Bcckkkkkkmmmmm~!_**

-It was so loud and mighty, that it shook the earth, dislodged twigs from trees and sent entire flights of birds flying off in the distance.

Cynder stumbled, all the Apes howled. The Cloud Ripper snarled at the disruption, and craned her long neck up with a look of indignant rage.

Spyra cringed as pain blossomed in her side. Despite that, she was taken completely by the same thing Cynder was. Even all the Apes had stopped whooping and hollering, and they too were watching the skies in confusion, scratching their ugly heads and shrugging to one another.

"What in the balls of the Ancestors was _that?_" Cynder finally hissed when no one in the field spoke.

"_Look!_" An Ape pointed to the north. Cynder and Spyra followed his finger, and together, the two dragonesses' eyes went wide.

Descending on a trail of blackened soot, riding a fat arm of smog that ran the distance of what appeared to be several miles across the local horizon, was a rolling miniature sun.

The fireball was easily ten times Cynder's size. It was bigger than some of the mushroom trees that were present in the Funguswood. Spyra almost completely forgot about the pain in her flank as she shivered onto her feet, and watched with awe as the meteorite descended on a highway of unholy flame.

"It's a shootin' star! Someone make a wish." One of the Apes proclaimed proudly. Another punched him in the face and snarled.

"That ain't a shootin' star, you simp'."

"Well, whatever it is, it's comin' this'a-way!"

"_Scatter!_" Cynder barked, unfurling her wings as the ground trembled, and a bright, neon orange began to highlight the fronts of both her and Spyra's forms. The earth turned amber, trees turned yellow and the sky was blindingly bright.

The Apes jumped, leaped and sprinted in all directions, grabbing vines, hopping stones or vaulting mushrooms. They climbed trees, trampled each other and left their wounded for dead. A whole cadre of them threw their arms in the air and sprinted back inside the cave they'd come from.

In the chaos, Chieftain Visigoth had collected himself, blood dripping from his mouth as he blinked at the descending meteorite, and traced its trajectory.

_The cave._

It was going to hit the cave!

"_No!_" Visigoth barked through his broken teeth, lumbering like a zombie towards the cavern's mouth.

"Chieftain, bugger all, forget the cavern!" Tinker had of course stayed in the back to observe the violence. Now, he scrambled over, yanking on Visigoth's trunk-thick arm in panic. "You aren't going to get anywhere if you're dead! And neither will the tribe!"

"But the crystals-"

"_Chieftain!_ We're sitting on a hot cigar, and the fat lady is singing! We need to run!"

Visigoth quivered with rage. He hollered and drove a fist into the earth, before grabbing up his axes, hooking his squealing mechanic in his arm and sprinting away.

"_This isn't over, she-beast!_" Visigoth called back.

"Cannot handle a single dragon, but _experts_ are they at fleeing like roaches." Cynder spat. She cast one baleful look down at Spyra, and leaped into flight without even giving herself the chance to sneer.

Spyra watched her go, before scrabbling on the earth, ignoring the flares of terrible pain in her ribs. She rolled over a log, zipped between trees, and raised her head just in time to see the flaming star pass right over where she was standing. The comet was so close, that sweat began to glisten and run down her scales.

The fireball incinerated the forest canopy in a hellish ash-rain of cinders and burnt embers. Trees collapsed, trunks snapped and mushrooms exploded into spore-clouds and chunks of fungus-flesh.

An earthquake ate away at the swamp, and the entire clearing just where she had fled from vanished in a flash of light. Spyra was lifted from her feet. The earth separated and revealed glowing bands of what appeared to be an underlayer of magma muscle. Trees were ripped from their root balls and cast away like mere flowers on the wind. Rocks the size of housing huts hit the ground and shattered, sending chunks flying everywhere.

Spyra landed painfully in a grove, branches and clogs of dirt toppling over her and thinly burying her.

The air was dominated by a non-stop roar of primordial volume and strength. The wind whipped, wood screeched as it ripped and rocks clattered as they were destroyed. The wrath of this heavens-borne object was immense and seemingly endless. Spyra truly thought for the longest while that she had died.

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, everything stopped.

The wind settled, the roar subsided, and the searing heat eating away at her scales began to taper. The last few pebbles scattered and dirt crunched, but then, a serene quiet impregnated the atmosphere.

Nothing moved, and all Spyra could hear was the wheezing rush of her own panting.

Slowly opening her eyes, the dragoness stewed under the blanket of soil and tree foliage keeping her pinned in the terrain's indent. She didn't dare move in fear of inciting some kind of retaliatory insurance strike meant to completely kill anything that had survived the first barrage.

But nothing came for what felt like hours. In reality, it was only a few minutes.

_…I can't move._

Spyra's eyes fluttered as she thought of what that sentence in her head was _really _meant to say.

_I'm too afraid to move._

"…_N-No, no I'm not afraid of-_" –Spyra's whisper was cut off in a sharp wheeze. Twigs and dirt tumbled off her as a sharp pain jolted her from her makeshift, would-be grave. She grit her fangs and tenderly touched a blood-soaked claw to the wounds on her flank. "-_anything…._" She sorely concluded, sweeping an eye about her surroundings.

Cynder the Cloud Ripper was nowhere to be found. As were all the Apes. She couldn't even see the trees that hadn't been ripped to shreds anymore either. Everything was shrouded in dancing, thick, choking smog and soot. Embers fell like glinting, orange snow, and rained in a slow, continuous and immense procession with the speed of descending flecks of parchment.

Spyra reached out and caught one of them on her palm, watching as the glowing little snowflake simmered out, and turned into an expended little strip of black powder on her scales.

Suppressing a tortured whine through her teeth, Spyra shivered as she lifted herself from the debris and stepped out of the incline. She stood in the middle of the chaos, beaten, panting, and unsure of what the hell had just happened.

_Exploding monkeys, other dragons, evil plots for everyone I care about, and now the sky is falling._

Spyra lumbered drunkenly through the haze, coughing as soot clogged her nostrils and her burning throat. She staggered carefully up a rise of dirt , bowing her head, as if willing her horns to somehow take the smoke's might instead of her lungs.

_How am I gonna' explain this to anyone back home? I mean, it can't get any worse than-_

Spyra's jaw dropped as she reached the summit of the crater's ring.

The cave, the clearing, and for what looked like a mile of the landscape had been completely cleared and transformed into a bowl-shaped impact crater. The canyon was huge. Ten times the size of her village, beautifully highlighted with glowing orange ember-snow, and obscured in great licks of smog that blotted out the wilting horizon of dying, burning trees penning the crater in on all sides.

Lying directly in the heart of the newborn valley, nestled on a bed of interlocking, magma-tinged veins running in a gauntlet about the dirt, was a glowing boulder, one that glinted, like it was made of metal.

The boulder was huge, and buried up to the nape in the center of the crater, steam covetously winding and licking up and down from its surface and edges.

Spyra blinked when something metallic clacked. It was a quaint noise that traveled across the entire zone. The dragoness' heart stopped beating when something on top of the rock moved.

There was a figure perched on top of the metal bulb. It was standing on two legs, and it wasn't an Ape.

* * *

{🐉}


	7. Chapter 6 - The Fallen

**Dragon(s)layer**

**6**

* * *

**The Fallen**

* * *

_**{Halo Wars OST: Best Guess at Best}**_

* * *

A rock rolling down one of the slopes made her yip and jump in her own scales. This, of course, aggravated the gore-wounds on her flank. Spyra hissed and nursed the bloody gashes before continuing on, limping on her right side.

She had been scaling down through the crater for the last fifteen or so minutes. It hadn't looked as flat-sloping as it had from the overhead view she'd enjoyed on the summit. The asteroid had completely wrecked everything. The earth was splitting, there were patches of smoldering glass, and jagged debris was everywhere.

But as Spyra wormed and limped closer to the crater's heart, her cares for all the other inconveniences melted away.

"…_Woah…_" She breathed, staggering through her injury over a collection of rocks. She now stood just a few feet away from the metallic sphere that was sticking from the crater's center. It was unbearably hot here, and the air was wavering with ghostly heat fluctuations. Spyra was perfectly fine with the temperature only due to her fiery inner workings. She limped through the banding air without so much as a flinch.

Speaking of her fire… that black dragon, _Cynder._ She should've had her face turned to toast. Her elegant, pretty, erotically-tattooed and slender face...-

Spyra snorted and spat an ember into the dirt.

That prissy bitch tried to rip her throat out. Fuck her outstanding looks. She was a dirty liar. _Nobody_ was invulnerable to magic.

Once Spyra got a hold of the obvious mother fucking alien that just smacked down in the middle of their two-dragoness war, she was going to use its mind powers to break Cynder and kick her bodacious ass back to wherever she'd sauntered up from.

It had to be an alien, right? Like her stupid, fathead brother always used to tease her about when she was little. Could he actually have been right about their existence?

She wasn't doubting anything right now. All in the span of an hour or so, she'd been introduced to Apes, another dragon, and a meteor shower. Nothing was beyond reason anymore.

Spyra crunched glass underfoot as she stopped just beside the rounded rib of the great sphere. Up close, it looked even bigger, despite its contrasting tinyness in comparison to the rest of the crater.

The sky was so clogged with soot that very little sunlight dappled through to touch about the landscape. Instead, it was the amber from all the embers and the fires crackling about the ground the reflected dimly off the sphere. Wiggling serpents of caramel color danced up and down the lead surface.

Spyra glanced up at the top of the object and blinked when only smoggy clouds circling above met her gaze. She staggered on her wounded side and craned her neck about, trying to pierce the veil with her purple eyes.

"…._Hello?_" She muttered, not really willing to call out and possibly alert whatever had crawled out of the sphere. She looked back at the object and started to limp around its flank, searching for any kind of opening, or doorway, or porthole. She found nothing and stopped after a few struggling hops on her hind leg.

She hissed and leaned over herself to examine the damage. Cynder's horns had ripped three good, deep, bleeding wounds into her purple side. If she didn't get them covered up soon, she'd bleed out, or they'd get infected.

Without medicine back home, either way, she was going to die. This certainly wasn't the first time she had hobbled back home to her mom with a broken bone or a few gashes, but this felt a little more extreme than the results of falling out of a tree or tripping over an errant mushroom.

_Yeah, mom, I may need a really big band-aid, I almost got killed by the first dragon I've ever met and her army of monkeys._

Spyra shivered, imagining how wide Cometcu's mandibles could gape.

Right as she was fiddling with one of the loose flaps of flesh dangling from the cringe-worthy wound, Spyra realized that the only reason she was still standing was because of her draconic toughness. No dragonfly could've sustained the damage she had and still press onwards.

_Still hurts like hell._

She sighed and leaned back onto her front legs.

She noticed something standing in the smog right between her and the asteroid. She looked up and blinked, and a pair of white, drab-iris eyes blinked back at her.

Spyra squealed like a startled pig and scrambled onto her back, kicking, panicking, forgetting about the pain in her ribs as she clawed through the glass and ash on the ground to get away from the thing.

_My brother was right! Aliens! _An_ alien! And it's gonna' eat my brain and play jump rope with my spine and- and…. and…. wait, holy crap, it's… it's not moving._

Spyra held a paw over her breast, panting as she gazed at the towering creature. The figure was upright, similar to the Apes she had encountered, but it didn't lumber as a hunchback, and it certainly didn't have the same offensive odor or ungainly edge to its shoulder line.

It was very meek, and it didn't make a sound. It had an almost cherry-shaped face, wreathed in pale flesh, lacking fur, scales, leathery coverings or chitin. A mop of fuzz topped its peculiar head, dust black, and a long nose-bridge decorated the space between its rather small eyes, at least, small in comparison to her big, dinner-plate dragon eyes.

Spyra struggled to her feet as the thing kept a distance from her. Her jaw was slack as she examined it, her eyes tracing down creamy white skin that wrapped quaintly around a curled, obvious ribcage. That sloped into a pair of stern shoulders and arms almost as thin as hers. Tiny dabs of hair ran down its forelimbs like miniature black forests. Two legs supported narrow hips, a bit of a gut beneath a lean pack of quad muscular abs decorating the front of its torso. It looked like an organism designed to be quick, and agile, and hit hard.

Kind of like her.

"_…Uhm-_" Spyra coughed as her own phlegm caught in her throat. She blinked drunkenly and staggered on her heels. "…uhm, _….yeah, so… _so that was some… _uhm…_ _route_ that you took in your…."

Spyra meekly glanced back up at the sky, and then down at the creature again.

"-in your _landing._"

The alien didn't say anything and didn't move. Spyra blinked.

"..._Uhm, _hold on, my brother told me what to say a long time ago, if I ever met aliens... _Oh,_ yeah, _ehmmmm: I come in peace."_

_..._Nothing.

Had the impact rattled its brain or something? Spyra awkwardly bit her lower chop as the alien merely stood in the wavering heat fuzz around the metallic sphere it had ridden in on. Its eyes were glazed in a similar state of disorientation as hers, and for just a moment, it teetered, and Spyra was caught between edging forwards to catch it and staying away from it for obvious reasons.

_Yeah, I doubt first contact relations would go over well if in trying to catch a falling alien, I impaled him through the arse' on my horns._

Speaking of, that brought up an interesting point…

Did this thing have a gender? Did it have a _name? Could it speak? _All the other things that had popped up and tried to fuck her up today had those.

But judging by the way it was looking at her, this creature looked dumber than a pile of bricks. It still hadn't moved. All it needed to do was bend over and eat some grass and start chewing like a cow.

She supposed there'd be no mad mind powers for her to take advantage of after all in her battle against Cynder, wherever that psycho bitch had fluttered off to…

"…Another dragon…" Spyra looked off into the smog to her south, back the way she had come. There was a strange resentment in her heart for not being able to see Cynder in the sky, flying proudly, and independently. "...Well, whoever or whatever you are, you showed up just in the knick of time. I thought I was a goner."

Spyra yipped and grabbed her wounded flank, shivering.

"-_Ah! _I might... I might _still_ be a goner at this rate... _shit._"

Suddenly, a creamy skinned hand appeared in her peripheral vision. Spyra squawked and jumped back. The alien had stepped closer- eerily silently as well –during her daydreaming. Its face mimicked an expression at least that she could read. It looked… _concerned? _Agitated? Maybe she really _didn't_ know.

"Hey_._" She growled, bearing her teeth when it stepped forward again and reached for her flank a second time, its eyes skimming over the wounds raking down her side. "Hands off the merchandise, alien scum. For all I know, you could've shorn through the clouds just to find some innocent, unsuspecting female to take advantage of and- _ohmygodthatsadick…_"

Spyra gawked when a wisp of smog blew away on the wind, revealing a white, flopping organ that bounced between the alien's legs, dangling limply, and loosely, right over a very exposed, un-sheathable scrotal pouch. All of it was covered in a curious dusting of black pubic hair.

Spyra felt her flame-glands light up and shoot into the roof of her mouth, and she broke into a slight cold sweat. She didn't want to admit it, but the sight of that thing, that… very obvious _penis_ flopping around was reminding her of her earlier mental thoughts in the swamp.

_Boy dragons. But this isn't a dragon, it's… an alien, or something. A boy alien._

Spyra's snout suddenly felt flushed, and she coughed, pawing at her face to hide a very evident, strikingly pink blush.

The alien's gaze rose to her, before he followed her eyes. His expression turned into something fierce before he glared up at the sky, muttering something under his breath.

"-_W-What?_" She croaked. She had to crane her neck to make eye-contact with him. He was over two feet taller than her in her quadruped stance. "Did you just speak?"

The alien paused and hugged his arms about his chest. A self-protective gesture, if nothing else. The dragoness felt her heart leap when his lips parted, revealing two rows of stubby, white little teeth.

"-_Find her! Scour the wreckage and find that dragon! And find whatever fell!_"

Her and the alien both glanced to the south through all the smoke and soot. It was Cynder, her trumpeting voice was echoing over the crackle of the fires and the din of the heat boom. Spyra hissed as her wounds flared. She almost lost her balance and started to teeter. She yelped when a pair of cool, soft palms fell on her other side.

There was a jolt of something foreign, some unknown energy swirling around in her guts. All at once, on contact with the alien's cool, fleshy palms, Spyra experienced a swell of emotions, all of them bubbly, fluttery and awkwardly toasty. Shivering at the embarrassingly pleasant sensation, her big purple eyes met the alien's as he steadied her, and then, his lips brimmed into an expression she understood.

He was grinning, and opening his mouth to speak.

"-_There's somethin'!_"

On a nearby ridge, an Ape pointed with his axe as he and a cluster of fifteen or twenty more warriors climbed down behind him. Spyra saw movement overhead and noticed a series of Apes working their way in an orderly line down the rim of the blast crater. They held strange, triangularly shaped devices in their paws. One of them raised it in his palms, and the air cracked as he pulled a small trigger on its handle.

**_Fww—pKKKK! _**–Her and the alien's heads whipped over to see a crossbow bolt sticking out of the dirt right beside the latter's naked foot. The alien mumbled something again, his voice crawling like gravel.

Still being touched by him, the very confused dragon looked down at the hands on her scaly waist, and then looked at him, her pupils dilating despite the evident danger.

"What did you just say?" She asked dumbly. He didn't answer her immediately, and Spyra yelped when the alien knelt down, and before she knew it, there was a cool-skinned, hairy arm sweeping under her belly, and curling around her shoulder.

She gasped as he lifted her off the ground with a pained grunt and hauled her over his shoulder. He turned and started sprinting, his face contorting as his heels crunched through the smoldering glass. He ran at a quickened, strange pace, on two legs, bounding strides one footfall after another. Even the Apes didn't run like this. They didn't run so… _athletically._

"I've got you."

Spyra held onto his fleshy back, and her breath hitched when his voice crawled up to meet her hearing-holes again. This time, she understood him.

A spear smacked into the earth just behind them. Two more of its kind sailed to their right and left . Spyra struggled as her side stabbed her repeatedly with swells of agony. She supported herself on the alien's shoulder, looking up with bleary eyes as spears and crossbow bolts appeared through the very ash cloud over their heads, raining down on them like hail. The Apes were trying to turn the crater's heart into a kill zone.

The dragoness was just searching for things to gawk at, all to distract herself from the fact that she so was terrified she felt her bladder threatening to void itself in her lap and on the alien's chest. Cringing at the idea, she bobbed with his movements and struggled to get a glimpse at the side of his face.

His features were odd to her- despite all that was happening –they were stubby and round. Soot blackened his otherwise blemishless cheeks and his eyes were as wild as hers, and entirely focused on the direction he was running. He staggered over rocks and vaulted crags in the soil. She couldn't have moved this fast, what with her flank eating her up.

"-_S-So,_" She called over the din of the apocalyptic haze around them. "-_fall from the sky often, buddy?_"

The creature hefted her over his arm and started clawing at the rim of the crater, digging his fingernails into the tumbling soil. He started to crawl up the rise, grunting, turning beat-red around his face and sweating as he heaved her. She started to slide off his shoulder at one point, and she inadvertently scrambled on his back, her wildly flailing claws ending their journeys by driving their talons into his exposed flesh just beneath his scapula.

"Oops." She winced. The alien barked and snarled, scrabbling up the dirt like a desperate rat.

A spear stood out of the dirt right beside them, and soon the rise of scorched earth resembled a pin-cushion as the Ape's lack of accuracy took hold. Spyra opened her mouth and illuminated the air over both of them with reams of golden flame as she incinerated any spearhead or bolt that was aimed truer.

"Don't people know how to climb where you come from?!" Spyra called, hissing and belching another plume of fire. A spear that would've driven right through his back vanished in a lick of black ash, the cindering head smacking painfully, but uselessly off his skin. He barked again, and Spyra cringed as a blackened, crimson welt started to bloom upon his very delicate flesh. "And jeez', you're like a piece of glass, guy."

The alien snapped something and elbowed her in her good flank.

"-_Ouch~! Rawr! You, little-_" Spyra's jaw dropped as he mounted the summit.

What kind of noise had _that_ been that came out of her throat? She'd never growled at someone like that before. But something about that rough contact just made her… she didn't know, _antsy?_ Rowdy?

Her hips felt warm against him and that flush was coming back across her face.

What the hell was this alien doing to her?

They both cried out as they tumbled roughly over the lip of the crater, more spears following after them and clattering uselessly off the soil and rocks. Spyra barked as she rolled her gore-wounds in the dirt, then landed on a blackened tree trunk, hard enough for the bark to crack, and _of course,_ right on her new bloody holes.

"-_Augh~!_" She screamed, writhing like a snake. "-_Hooomygawd that fuckin' hurt~!_"

"Get up."

Spyra's agony was washed away by his voice again. He scooped her off the tree and slung her over him like a sack of potatoes. Overhead, the air whooshed and the angry cry of a draconic beast echoed across the landscape.

"_Find that dragon!_" –Shrieked Cynder distantly, the beat of her wings drumming through the smog. "_Spread out and find her!_"

"Since when was I this popular?" Spyra snuffled, snot running down her nose to mix with the tears streaking down her dirty cheeks. "We gotta' move, alien man. You don't mind if I call ya' that, do you?"

Looking around frantically, the pink creature ran for the nearest line of trees that hadn't been wrecked by the shockwave. They were forced to sprint and hop over a grim outer ring of fallen willows, twisting roots, jagged soil and flickering fires. There were so many fallen logs that the horizon appeared ribbed, like the ridges of a dune.

The whoops and bellows of Apes rushed to meet them. Spyra saw gray furred, lumbering shapes materializing over the bend from whence they came, the Apes rolling, sliding and falling over the debris like a swarm of encroaching ants, tens and tens of them.

Spyra was normally the one who would've chided out some comment about how she could've taken them.

But she'd come to terms with the fact that she was just a tad in over her head as of late. She was quick, but good reflexes wouldn't help you if you were getting swamped by nearly forty monkeys who each had the strength of two of you.

Her alien savior/carrier seemed to have a similar mindset to hers. He exhaled loudly and redoubled his efforts to get away, grunting and kicking with her draped like a limp, purple noodle over his flank.

"I know that this isn't the best time to say," Spyra cried. "but I have a _load_ of questions!"

He ignored her. More crossbow bolts whipped over their heads and planted into logs and boulders and mushrooms that hadn't been vaporized.

The ash cloud lingering like a misting of blood over the Ape army parted and revealed what Spyra at first thought was a massive bat descending towards them. However, as soon as she flexed her crimson wings backward, diving, Cynder's identity became all too apparent.

The Cloud Ripper appeared to be very angry with them if Spyra didn't know any better. Her white eyes were narrowed with this blood-rage that made Spyra shiver inside her own coat.

"_There you are!_" Cynder sang, she spread her wingspan and buffered her approach, her mouth opening with a fanged smile, as more energy billowed in the back of her throat. When the arms of her wings pierced the air, it created a shrill, echoing _shriek_ that could be heard for miles.

_Terror of the Skies..._

Her element she was brewing wasn't red this time. It was a sickly, very bright neon green.

_Poison!_

"_Duck!_" Spyra choked.

Her alien obeyed as he leaped over a burning willow trunk. A glistening, green projectile flicked right over their heads. It hit a tree, and immediately began to eat away at the bark as the triangular object exploded and was reduced to a syrupy pile of running acid. Steam rose whilst the wood liquefied.

"This bitch could probably pull keys out of her ass…" Spyra hissed as he ran with her, her side leaking blood down his naked back. "Hey, guy? I'm sorry about the blood."

He grunted and swept underneath a mushroom cap. No sooner had he done so did the mushroom implode into a cluster of spores and flipping, poison-covered chunks. The Cloud Ripper zipped ever closer, only seeable as a quick black shadow as she peppered their path with poison-bolts that burst like green misting grenades.

"_I have you now!_" Cynder screeched, unfurling her rear talons and dipping her breast lower to catch her prey like a hawk would a mouse.

Spyra's face dropped as she watched the encroaching talons threaten to close around her unprotected face.

Just then, her alien tripped over a root.

She and him fell with a duo of startled cries, and Cynder roared in displeasure as her metallic claws snapped together through empty air. She bucked her wings and left marks all over a willow's flank, flying into the swamp-tree blocking her flight path.

Cynder roared.

She'd lost them!

Spyra and the alien tumbled down a muddy estuary dry-up, rolling, bouncing and pressing together as they passed rapidly between trees, boulder formations and creeper nets that shaded the air over their heads.

She hit a mushroom cap and sprawled over it tiredly, gritting her fangs as the giant bulb of fungus caught her belly. **_Pwccskkkk~! _**–went the mushroom. Her talons dug into it and bled white trails of shroom-juice as she dug in and nearly ripped the stalk from its basing. She deflated against the cap and panted in suffering.

At least it had stopped her.

The purple dragoness glanced over and saw the alien tumble over a patch of tall grass and roll to a halt right beside her fungus-stop. Covered in lacerations, bruises, and with trails of her drying, rich dragon blood running down his arm and back, he scrambled to his feet, still naked, and hurried over to her.

If it wasn't for all that had happened, Spyra would've sworn that the day was suddenly going as they always did here. Despite the distant boom of the crash site and the faint crackle of flames, the only thing off was the blackness clogging the skies.

The trees here in this clearing were unaffected and still quite healthy. Methane wisps clouded the humus-blanketed ground and frogs croaked quietly in a nearby green-watered sump. The sun was threatening to breach the edges of the apocalypse cloud looming just behind them.

Cynder's distant, echoing roars were quick though to remind her of her peril.

"…._Not afraid of anything…_" Spyra chortled quietly, suddenly feeling a whole lot guiltier than she was used to feeling.

The alien's cool hands running down her flank jolted her back to reality. She growled like a startled dog, and swatted one of his wrists with a loud, scale-to-flesh _clap~! _

The alien quipped something that sounded like an- '_Ow' –_and stepped back, gazing at her in confusion behind his drab and white eyes. She had to cough a few times to clear up her throat before speaking.

"-_I appreciate the help, buster, but like I said- *cough-cough* -hands _off _the merchandise…_" She snarled, peeling her golden plates off the mushroom. She produced a wet clap as her haunches hit the mud. "...And not for nothing, you could give a 'ness a second to catch her breath. It isn't every day some random, undocumented species runs away with you over their shoulder..."

She clicked her tongue and ran a paw over her gored side, looking down at her cracked, breastplates, where they were now stained with milky-colored mushroom paste from the impact.

"Oh, _perfect._" She snorted. "I don't look any better than a starved weasel right out of a carcass' guts... or my brother after that Toadwort coughed him up."

She huffed and flicked her wings, casting droplets of heaven-knew what all over the area, some of them flecking onto the creature's bare ankles, which appeared to make him frown.

"It's true, my brother ended up just like this a little while ago, and I laughed at him for it." Spyra picked a leaf from behind the crease of her nostril and blew it from her fingers. "These are _my_ swamps. I'm supposed to know everything that goes on in them."

The alien lowered his hands and raised a hairy brow at her, panting, with sweat glistening off his form. He was evidently still winding down from all the running. Spyra couldn't say she blamed him, taking a long moment to examine him in the quiet din of the marsh. The skin covering his body glinted in the dull light and was sheened with perspiration. Chords of tight muscle wound beneath the flesh of his limbs, leaving him narrow-waisted, but obviously built. The dragoness slapped her chops and discovered herself ogling.

"-_Uhm,_" Spyra blushed and turned away. "-sorry, I don't normally stare at people."

And she normally didn't apologize so readily to anyone outside her family. Today was weird.

"At least we got away." Spyra nursed her side and looked around. "I know where we are too. This is one of the natural causeways just on the edges of where I make my rounds. Cynder shouldn't be able to see us from the air down here, the canopy's too thick."

She looked back at the alien.

"But now how the heck am I supposed to explain _you?_" She said, pointing a talon at him. "Maybe you're a hallucination! I must be going delusional or something. Too much time around the mushrooms, just like uncle Ditterweight used to say..."

Her otherworldly companion made to open his mouth, but a sharp, manic cackle from the shivering dragoness interrupted him.

"-_Haha~! Ha!_" Spyra hugged herself, rocking on the ground a little bit. "_Ohmyfuckinggod… I am losing my miiiinnnnddddd~…_" –She moaned.

"-_Uhm-_" –Crawled from the alien's throat.

"-_And_ that isn't even the worst of it! You dig this? That big, evil goth-slut back there knows about my village! She knows about my _family!_ My home! And now I… I'm stuck out here… too far away to warn them…" Spyra's fetal rocking stopped, and the dragon appeared to deflate, almost melting into the earth. Her long tail curled ominously over her ankles. Her purple eyes dilated as she suddenly felt very cold. "…I… I probably just killed my mom, and my dad, and my stupid, fat-head brother and I… I can't save them…"

Nothing more had to be said. Spyra stewed in that silence, staring at the muddy ground, covered in blood, dirt and ash. She felt all of the last hour or so crash down on her in one rushing advance. She shivered from paw to horn, and a single tear broke through the barricades of her resolve to wander down her purple cheek.

The alien took a step closer but faltered. He was left shifting on his heels, a defeated sigh escaping him as he held a hand out and then retracted it. The two of them didn't move.

"…For an alien, you're awfully quiet." He blinked when Spyra spoke again, running a knuckle over her snout and leaving a slug-trail of snot on her arm. "What's the matter? Asteroid impact got your tongue? Oh, gimme' a break, who am I kidding? For all I know, you came down here to kill and eat people."

"-_Uhm-_" –He started.

"You couldn't get an easier meal, alien man." Spyra winced as more blood leaked out her gore-holes. She was lightheaded now, her vision blurry on the edges of its sphere. She had a headache and felt very thirsty. All she could do was slap her dry tongue and cough. "Go on. Use your mind powers and fry my brain or something… I'd probably deserve it after what I just did, or… what I _didn't_ do."

She made eye contact with him from the ground, snorted, and then looked down at his crotch.

"…Wait a second, don't tell me; you came down here to do _that _to people instead of eating them, didn't you?"

He gasped and snatched a large frond-leaf off a fern. It at least shielded everything below his hairy navel.

"That would be my luck, getting saved by a _space-rapist_ _alien_." She rolled her eyes, doting on the frond and for some reason wishing he'd take it off. "Is that what you do? You invade from the heavens and make off with unwilling victims? Just tell me now, it'll make the impact easier."

"…_No_."

Her head peeked as he spoke, his tone sounding indignant, meek, for its strange form. It was deep, but moderate, slightly gravelly and… _tuned_ all at once. Where the Apes were guttural, dragonflies were squeaky, and she was daggered, feminine and gruff, he was… _average._ He sounded mediated.

"No, I'm not here to rape or eat anyone." He mumbled in plain common, Spyra watching as his quaint lips moved and he pressed the leaf tighter to his junk.

"So you can talk though." She cocked her head.

"Of course I can talk."

"Well how am I supposed to know? You almost crushed me riding down from the sky's axis on a mother fucking asteroid, dude."

"It wasn't-" He cut himself off, fiddling with the leaf as he sighed again. "-it wasn't supposed to happen like… like the way it did."

"I dunno', how do you muff up an atmospheric impact?" She shrugged with her wings. "What are you?"

"_Alive._" He grumbled, slapping the mud as he sat on the ground in front of her, his shaking hand clenching over his forehead as he tried to relax. "I'm alive and that's all that matters to me right now."

"I'm so happy that _you're_ at least this comfortable right now." Spyra sifted closer to him in fascination, her terrified eyes wide like dinner plates as she scrutinized him. "…_Erm, _I didn't mean to claw your back earlier, or bleed on you and stuff, I… uhm… and _thanks,_ for, ya' know, carrying me to safety and…"

"Where am I?"

"Pardon?"

"What world is this? What is the name of this land?" He let his hand slide down his face, his eyes questioning.

"_The _world? What other world is there? And, what, you mean the _swamp?_ It's the swamp. It's all I've ever known." Spyra rattled out a tiny groan of pain. She gripped her flank. "_…I… wow,_ I don't… I don't feel well…"

"Your wounds." He startled her by slapping himself on the forehead. He scrambled around her and knelt in the mud, leaning down to examine her purple flank. "Let me see them."

"It's just a scratch." She drunkenly swatted at him, groaning as he gripped her warm hide and nudged the dragon over to expose more of her ribs and her golden plated belly curve. "-_Stop it._ See? I knew it. You're a fuckin' rape alien."

"You've lost too much blood." He raised a hand from her flank and grimly stared at it. His palm was glistening crimson. "I need to fix you."

"…So you _do_ have mind powers…" She smiled toothily as he hoisted her up on his shoulder again.

"_Nope._" The man grunted. "Just some wisely applied expertise from minds broader than mine."

* * *

{🐉}

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}**_

Spyra's throat flexed as she drank the refreshing swill of water. At her direction, the alien had found a clean reservoir lane leading into a dumpoff at a nearby sump. The water trails that flowed from the Forbidden Funguswood were always safe to drink where the ponds and stagnant sumps weren't. His pink fingers clenched the underside of a clamshell that he had found and cleaned on the side of the rocks. She coughed as some of the water went down the wrong pipe.

"Better?" He muttered, taking the shell back and returning to his work.

"Tastes like stone." She slapped her snake-tongue wetly, craning over her shoulder to coo in interest at what he was doing. "What's all that stuff, alien man?"

He was skinning the vein of a frond leaf with his fingernails and a stick he had acquired, scouring the vein like it was a corn cob until it was relatively streamlined.

"Fern leaves." He shrugged, tying the vein around another of its kind, glancing worriedly at the gore-holes. The brook running down the rocks just beside them babbled and slapped quietly over their words.

"Way to go, genius, there's no pulling the wool over your eyes." She huffed.

"It's just to stop the bleeding." He was talking with his mouth full. He spit out a wad of chewed root pulp and stuck the mushy, gross substance over the center hole. He saw her rearing back to yell at him and shook his head. "Relax."

"You just drooled all over me!" She whined in displeasure, her wings unfurling and spreading out behind her. "That's gross!"

"I'm sorry." He said, sticking more of the chewed pulp around the wounds before applying another leaf- one not skinned –and lightly compressing it until it stuck.

"That wasn't your dick-leaf was it?"

He smiled and sifted his knee aside a little bit, revealing the same frond he'd used earlier, much to her relief.

"Sit up, I need to secure this." He ordered.

She complied, and the reptile immediately whined when his cool hands slipped under her waist and snaked the long tethered line of frond-veins he had turned into a series of makeshift ropes.

She supported herself over the ground painfully, waiting for him to loop it once, twice, and then a total of four times around her lithe torso. On the last bend, he lightly pushed her back down and began to tie the two halves together, yanking them tightly, so that the frond covering her ribs crumpled loudly against four separate compression points. He pressed his palms against it for a moment and held it there.

Spyra breathed out of her mouth, her eyes dancing over the pink, fleshy hands and arms of his form. They settled on his face, and the dragoness felt her wings preening in a response beyond her own volition. She swallowed, breathless at the mysterious creature touching and helping her.

"If you're not gonna' tell me _what_ you are, can I least have a name?"

He glanced at her, conflicted, as he made to speak.

"I'm human." He said.

"What's a _hu-man?_"

"_Human._ Two legs, two arms, upright, soft skin, hair in all the right places." He chuckled. "Too many of us to count too."

"Really?" She blinked, her tail flapping on the ground like an interested cat's. "There's more of you coming? The same way?"

"_No._" He answered quickly. "No, not at all. I'm… I don't know what I'm-"

Spyra cocked her head when he silenced himself and took his hands off the frond.

"…I don't have many answers about this myself." He finally relented. "Look, we can talk more about this later, but right now, I need to get you serious medical treatment. This isn't going to work for long. You said you had a village somewhere out here? I need you to lead me to it so they can help you."

"We're too far away." Spyra swallowed. "We'd never get there this close to the Forbidden Funguswood before nightfall. And now all those monkeys, those _Apes_ are looking for us. I can't risk leading them back to my home, back to my family."

"Other dragons?" He asked, bending and aiming a hand at her underside. "Hold on."

"_Dragon-_flies_~!_" –She yelped in pain. He hoisted her with a grunt over his arm, and as he turned, she was swiveled to face the brook stream. She watched it slap over the rocks as he started stepping away from it.

"Dragonflies?" He grunted.

"I was raised by them... you and that black dragon chasing us are the first people I've ever met who were the same size as me..." Spyra clutched him tightly, kneading her paws in his skin experimentally. "-And how do you know I'm a dragon if you aren't from here?"

"It's complicated. Which way?"

"You're walking in it." She sighed in defeat. "I can't lead these bastards back to my village, alien man, _human man,_ whatever the hell you are… I kindly request that you set me down and let me croak instead."

"_None of this makes sense._" He was muttering to himself, his eyes scanning the clear gray sky above as he hiked over the rocks. "_I shouldn't have been the only one to come down. They must have sent the others in-_"

**_Bckkmmmmmmm~! _**–another, very familiar break of thunder.

"Aw shit, you liar." Spyra watched as another comet, a smaller one, careened farther to their flank. It shot through the sky and impacted due west with an earth-shattering rumble and flash of distant amber. "There _are_ more of you."

"Not quite." He altered his course and started trekking in the newest arrival's direction. "But at least we just got a new, and closer solution to your little bandage problem."

"_Closer solution?_ What are you talking about!" Spyra cried, beating her fist into his back. "This whole day has gone down the latrine-pit! _Something make sense!_"

"Shush. You're gonna' bring your smelly friends and that red and black piece of ass back here in a hurry." He chuckled.

"I can't hear you when you're mumbling, _hu-man._"

"Forget it." He cleared his throat. "Just sit tight and let me get you in working order. Then, I can figure out where the heck I am and how I can fix all of this."

"The alien says so simply." Spyra groaned. "-I think I'm gonna' barf."

"Hold on." He started running. "Just keep awake and _hold on._"

* * *

{🐉}


	8. Chapter 7 - Metal Reminders

**Dragon(s)layer**

**7**

* * *

**Metal Reminders**

* * *

"Hold out your paw. Just like that. Now watch." Firefly said, before he slapped a glob of something warm, slimy and wet into Spyra's palm.

"-_Eew._" She crinkled her snout and leaned in closer to gaze through the darkness. "You know that if this is an Anteater turd, I'll drown you in the swamp."

"You can see in the dark!" Firefly laughed, his wings resonating like paper caught in the wind as he zipped down to the floor and scooped up another handful. "What does it look like to you?"

"Mud."

"_C'mon, sis'._"

"I dunno', kind of like…" Spyra squinted and sniffed at the strange goop, snorting at the rubbery scent. "…_amber?_ It looks like sap."

"_Dingdingding! _We have a winner." Firefly treated the material like he was packing a snowball, mashing it between his chitinous little fingers with sordid plops. What was a pinch of the stuff to Spyra was a whole armful to him. "Legends have been going around the village since before even mom or dad were born. Other dragonflies say that the sap of the _Moon Trees_ is blessed with healing energy and possessed by the spirits of animals."

Spyra noted his pause, and just when she opened her mouth to ask him what he was waiting for, the darkness of her brother's chamber began to recede in place of an eerie, white light.

"_Woah._" She whispered. The sap was glowing, reacting to the warm touch of a living being, or, perhaps merely being handled. It began to change from a syrupy hue of orange-brown to a vibrant, hollow, almost milky cream. The dragoness stared down at the mushy, dripping wad of sap, smiling.

"Spooky, huh?" Firefly sounded very pleased with himself as his own batch began to light up. "When I grew out of nyphhood, the pond I was in had tens of Moon Trees feeding off the reservoirs in the mud. They leaked sap every time a twig or limb fell off. I used to crawl up the trunks and let it run down my fingers."

"Aren't you just the little librarian." Spyra chortled, letting the pile wiggle on her palm like a stack of gelatin. It made the light playing around her bounce and dance, like she was rotating a crystal globe that was reflecting the cast of a torch. "How did you know it would glow?"

"Oh I didn't!" Firefly shook his head, his antenna whipping. "I never really noticed it when I played with the stuff during the day. But I did it at night and _wham! _Glowing sap!"

"What did you do?"

"I fell out of the tree of course. No wings back then, remember?"

They both laughed, hushing and hissing at each other so as not to disturb their parents in the next chamber over, who were sound asleep.

"I love exploring." Spyra breathed when they finally calmed down. She doted on the sap in her claw, letting it drip from her talons to leave speckles of embering white on the black floor between them. "We always find the coolest stuff out here, like giant bugs and those nasty Toadwort thingies."

"Yeah," Firefly shivered, casting a small cloud of glowing gold dust from his wings involuntarily. "all the _cool_ only somewhat-terrifying stuff that may or may not haunt me until my dying day, I hear you."

"What was it like being in the pond?"

"Like, as a _nymph?_"

"Yeah." Spyra's eyes melded from the glowing, jiggling sap onto her adoptive brother. "It had to be scary, right? And a lot different from being able to fly."

"Being in the water was a learning experience." Firefly sort of blurted out from nowhere, earning a surprised blink from the dragon. He must have looked awfully wise in that moment to the hatchling, but he was sure to keep it all hush-hush that he was only repeating what his own father had said to him when he'd asked the same question. "It teaches you about not being permanent in your lifestyle."

"I don't understand." Spyra cutely pushed one of her little paws into her cheek scales, squishing it around her knuckles as she blushed and giggled. "What's that got to do with anything, bro'?"

"Everything changes." Firefly shrugged. "Sticking to habit isn't productive, and life isn't really interesting or growing if things always stay the same. Imagine if that egg we found you in ended up with… _uhm…_"

Firefly clicked his mandibles as he worked around a comparison, his larger draconic sibling cocking her salamander-like head as she waited patiently. She was so pudgy as a hatchling. Her horns hadn't even grown in yet, and were still two, barely burgeoning little pegs of bronze on the back of her skull.

"…with Moon Trees!" He snapped his fingers, gesturing to the sap. Spyra looked down at it and sniffed it again, snorting. "Imagine if trees raised you to be nothing but a tree! And all you did all day long was sit around and try to catch the rays of the sun. That would suck."

"….that _would_ suck…" Spyra mumbled in fascination. "…no more exploring? If I was a tree?"

"Never for as long as you lived. –_Or,_ grew, I guess."

"That's terrible." Spyra shook her head and smiled at him. "I couldn't live without being able to move. I'm gonna' be an adventurer, bro', and figure out this whole swamp. I'm gonna' go out there, and find new things, just like you found this sap."

She flicked it at him, and Firefly chuckled as the glowing goop flecked on his wings and his narrow chest plates.

"I'll do it, even if it _kills_ me."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo Wars OST: Flollo}**_

* * *

Spyra's eyes snapped open. She gasped and clenched at her ribs, her vision bobbing, a sloping, creamy colored back with dried rivers of blood running down it taking up everything below her chin.

_I remember that stupid sap. I thought Firefly had slapped shit in my hand back then._

"Are you still awake?" –Droned the human's voice from behind her. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel-" Spyra's cheeks bulged and she hinged over his back, vomiting loudly as the white-colored, bile-like contents of her stomach plopped wetly on the ground right behind the alien's calves. She wretched until her gut was empty, and even then, dry heaves hoarsely kicked afterward. They aggravated her flame-glands, and caused sparks to lick past her teeth.

"That good I see." He grimaced.

"…_D-Did I fall asleep?_" She blubbered, watching as her pool of puke gained distance from them whilst her carrier jogged through the grass.

"You were talking just fine a few seconds ago." She felt his cool cheek pressing against her flank as his jaw moved. She craned past her elbow and watched the black matt of hair capping his head, her mind swimming as the brief dream replayed itself in her mind. "We're almost there."

"…Don't you worry about me, asteroid-man, you've got your own problems." Spyra winced as the skyline above their heads echoed with another nearby shriek that reverberated across the entire swamp.

The trees and mushroom stalks hanging over them loomed like ill-intending specters, shielding them as doubly as blinding them as to the whereabouts of the Cloud Ripper. Cynder had never stopped the chase, and every time a twig snapped, or the canopy shifted, it seemed that she was getting closer and closer to finding them.

They could hear the Apes too, gutturally screaming and hawing out into the marshes. A war horn etched its death-like trill through the trees, and the howls of the Apes seemed to double in number.

"…That's what I get for trying to follow through with childhood promises." Spyra snorted, wristing snot off her snout.

"What?" He grunted, climbing over a mushroom patch, and scattering the swarm of lantern bugs that had been nesting underneath the caps. Spyra chuckled as she tasted blood, and watched the luminescent, fire-glowing abdomens of the fist-sized insects. They scattered like an upwards traveling colony of snowflakes, vanishing into the canopy above.

"It's nothing. So tell me why the sky is falling, alien-man." Spyra nudged his face with her tail. "First you, and then what? You said there aren't more of you, and you said there aren't any big alien monsters following you. What was in the second rock?"

"They aren't rocks." He rebuked. "They're… _ehm…_"

"Explain it however you like, man, it's not like today can sound any weirder than it's already been."

"They're containment units." He specified awkwardly, finding a natural pathway, he wound between some trees and passed under the shadow of an immense mushroom rising nearly twenty-six stories into the gray sky above, it shielded them in dull shade-hue and its base was swarmed with dancing clouds of lantern bugs on early mating flights. "I'm not supposed to be here at the moment, or really at all. I'd tell you that it's a relief to me that they dropped me someplace with sentient life, but after what you've been through…"

His attempt at humor transformed into him merely letting the sentence hang out there. He cleared his throat, wincing as he waded, bare-foot, through a shallow reservoir drift. The green water made him wary of leeches and other marsh-born pests.

"-It doesn't matter, and it isn't your problem."

"Nu-uh, it _is_ my problem now. You didn't hear what I heard. I spied on those Apes before you came. They're going after my village when they're done chasing us down and hacking us into tiny dragon-giblets and alien cutlets." She adjusted on his shoulder.

"Well, that isn't _my_ problem." He darkly reminded, and she caught just a glimpse of his drab-irised eye as he glared at her.

"So, like, what, you're gonna' take me to this second rock-thing, fix me and then leave me out here?" Spyra gawked.

"You know this swamp better than I do." He said. "You have your war and I have mine."

"_War?_ Who said anything about war?" She snorted. "Is that what this is all about? You're from the _North,_ aren't you? You work for the dragons up in Warfang and are here to fight these people."

She snaked her tail in his face when he ignored her, catching his attention as he hissed in annoyance.

"What is it like there? How many other dragons are there? How many other races live in the Northern City? I've never heard about _hu-mans_ being there. But what do I know? I'm just some hick caught in the center." She nagged. "Do the other dragons there look like me?"

"I've never been to anywhere called _Warfang._" He grumbled. "I've never been anywhere on your world before. Places like it? Sure, once or twice, I guess before those assholes tossed my route into whack when I went through that gate."

"Did you forget that you have a second party over your shoulder?" She sighed tiredly, wincing at more pain from her flank. "You're ranting."

"I'm not affiliated with any north, south, west or east or any other direction or place or thing here. I'm here by _accident._ Or by really, really foul play. When I mean foul, I mean particularly _foul._ Foulness from something beyond either of us, that you would be wise to stay away from the moment I heal you and send you off." He explained sternly.

"You're making this sound exciting." She shivered. "So once we reach the crash site, then what?"

"Then nothing. You go home, and I lead these monsters away from your family and friends. You live the rest of your days soundly in some mud-hut and I go off and fight the boogeyman." He said. "There is no _what_. There is you go your way, and I go mine. Yes, I apologize for almost coming down on your head in a fiery death rock-"

"I thought they weren't _rocks_, stellar-boi'." She chided like a venomous feline.

"-_A fiery containment pod._" He corrected. "-But alas, I have very powerful, evil things trying to kill me across way more worlds than just yours, and frankly, I do not have time to get tied up with natives."

"_Ooo,_ natives, says the alien. Speakin' about _us_ like we're some primitive, spear-chucking savages who draw murals with our own crap and fuck our mothers to produce incestuous bastards." Spyra rolled her eyes. "And yes, I know I just described ninety-percent of the only organisms you've run into so far during your brief stay in _my_ swamps, but not everyone down here is like that!"

"I suppose you're proof."

"Hell to the yeah I'm proof, dude. I'm the finest _proof_ you are gettin' around these slimy parts." Spyra creased her lower chop, slapping him on the side of his head with her tail and making him grunt. "Proof enough of intelligence and perception."

"Really perceptive of you to dodge whatever gored you." He scoffed, grinning at her over his shoulder and her shapely dragon-thigh.

"Dick move, man, real dick move." She guffawed, watching his butt cheeks below her as they wiggled with each step he took. Spyra developed a muzzle-grin. "I've been wondering what dudes look like naked for a long time."

"Mm-hm." He grumbled dejectedly. "Can you stop staring at my ass, please?"

"But it's so _perky~._" She said sweetly, reaching down and copping a feel on his left cheek. "-_Honk._"

"_Stop!_" He barked, his movements faltering as he began to break a sweat. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to carry you _without_ you messing around?"

"Shut your face, buddy! I'm a very pissed off female with hormones and virginity." She tail-whipped his face again. **_Thwack~!_** "-Besides, a feel is the least you could give me after almost knocking my block off with a fucking _containment unit_ from sky-hell."

He cleared a copse of trees and immediately, the two of them noticed a rise in the temperature. The crackle of flames became louder, and he had to walk around several fallen trees and the incinerated, liquefying remains of a huge mushroom that had been split down its side and blackened.

Spyra craned over to watch as he slid down the embankment of a similar crater to the one his asteroid had made farther behind them. This impact crater was much smaller, not even a quarter of the size. But that was only in relation to the smaller stature of the object embedded in its heart.

"That's a containment thingie' too?" Spyra asked as he carefully stepped down the ruined, glass-covered earth towards it.

"Yep." The human frowned, his eyes scanning over the lead-colored wad of metal that was half-buried in the crater's pupil. "You okay to walk now?" He asked, his legs trembling.

"Yeah, I can hobble-" Spyra gasped as he slid her down immediately and deposited her on her good side, stepping over her and towards the object without even a glance. "…Are all _hu-mans_ such assholes?" She called back, her serpentine tongue flicking out the tip of her snout in agitation.

"Only the smart ones." He mumbled, stepping over some crushed glass. The pod was only half the size of the first one. Without fear, despite the wavering presence of heat-bands dancing up and down the metal, he bent lower, and touched his fingers to the unit, running them along its smooth surface, remarkably unblemished despite the atmospheric breach and impact.

The dragoness squeaked in pain as she scooted around to watch him feel-up the asteroid. Laying in the scorched dirt, Spyra raised a brow and sighed, her patience wearing thin as she gripped her chin and tapped her talons.

The human swept his palms everywhere, stepping around to the asteroid's flank, searching for some unseen groove, hole or whatever on the leaden metal.

"Bleeding to death over here." Spyra sang.

"I realized." He quipped back. "I'm working on it."

"…_aren't we all?_" She muttered, scratching at the frond-bandages he'd made her, and beating her tail in the dirt with displeasure. She looked down at herself and sighed in defeat.

Her beautiful golden belly and breast plating! _Ruined._ It was cracked all over the place, their edges each rough and hewn from the punishment she'd taken at the black dragoness' claws. She was covered in dirt, Ape blood, _her_ blood, sweat and mud. Her wonderfully saturated purple hide was now dulled and spattered with faint staining and speckling. Lacerations and cuts were everywhere, dabbed among the greater soiling like islands of destruction in a sea of mirth.

Saphide's soap bars would have a hard time rectifying this unholy mess.

Spyra's serpentine tongue snaked out of her mouth as she briefly considered leaning in to groom herself. One look at all the dirt and swamp-piss about her made her reconsider.

_Look at me! Dirty and bloody. Dragons are supposed to be regal and elegant! This is beneath me._

Was it ironic that she had just gotten her soap bars earlier today? Now she couldn't even get to them.

"Found it." He called over. The asteroid suddenly jolted in its placement, making her jump.

Earth crunched and metal slid against metal. Spyra- hissing as she nursed her bandages –went slack-jawed as the asteroid unit _opened,_ like a blooming flower.

Previously unseen division lines materialized along its smooth surface. The sphere-like chunk popped ajar, exposing a dark interior as four separate plates folded upwards, down and to the sides, like trap doors. The human clapped his hands and knelt as he dug within the asteroid's contents. As he did so, the leaf that had been clinging to his groin fluttered off in the heat waves. Spyra stared at his junk as he dug into the unit.

_Why the hell is it so floppy for?_

_Why the hell are _you,_ a buxom maiden of the skies, reducing yourself to sizing up an animal? An alien one, no less._

Spyra darted her gaze away immediately.

An animal? Perhaps not, but… she _was_ a dragon. Dragons were beings of supremacy. They were not meant by nature's design to be stricken in such personal matters with lesser creatures.

Not that she had been thinking about anything of the sort. It was just… _curious_, was all. She'd never seen the opposite sex before, not ones the same size as _her._ There were dragonflies, sure, but as she had reminded herself of before, she'd be dead before she tried to hook up with a _bug._

"_Damn it._" –The human grumbled as he leaned out of the unit, casting a glare back at its interior whilst he stepped away. "Alright you, stand still."

Spyra gasped as he approached her with a strange object in his hand. It was tube-shaped, with a sharp point sticking out its nose and a curious, blue-colored liquid sloshing around inside its glass contents.

"What is that?" She scooted backwards as he knelt before her. He took her paw in his hand, making her momentarily freeze at the contact.

"It'll fix you." He cryptically grumbled, lining the syringe with her wrist.

Being quadruped, Spyra's one paw was taken up balancing her on the ground and he had the other. So, the human didn't exactly know how to react when he went blind, as four fat, soft digits pressed cooly into his brow, nose and cheeks. He froze.

She had stuck her purple foot in his face and held him back.

"_No._" She shook her head. "What _is_ that?"

Brushing her toes away, he snorted and blew a leaf off his lips, lowering the syringe and leaning back from her.

"Healing solvent, inside a _regen-injection_." He said, jiggling the blue liquid inside the tube at her. "It's almost like a… a _potion._ You people have those down here, right?"

"Only the elders back home." Spyra eyed the syringe wearily. "Potions are _magic._ I've only seen dragonflies use magic a few times in my whole life. It's a rare and dangerous thing."

"So, what, you're a sage now?" The human held out his hands in appall.

"What? _No._ Fuck off with that, dude, sages are old, wrinkly and smell like mothballs." Spyra stuck her tongue out. "I just wanted some clarification before you go sticking something inside me."

He actually fucking _snickered._

So the alien had humor. Big whoop, for how it had sounded. Though, she supposed that she'd been giving him lip this entire time and it was due course for it to spin back around.

Still, Spyra gasped, a wild, pink flush spreading down her muzzle as he bent his head and chuckled on his knees. She went to raise her paw and back-claw him, but in doing so, she rammed the needle into her wrist with a tiny _boink~! _–like sound as it pierced the thin scales there.

"_Ow._" She uttered, looking down at the syringe as if she had forgotten it was there. He pressed the hammer down and a small portion of the blue liquid vanished as it pumped into her. "Asshole."

"Who? Me or you?" He grinned, sliding the syringe back and patting her wrist. He nodded at the makeshift bandages he'd made her and stepped back towards the opened unit. "Give it a few minutes and don't move."

"Yeah yeah yeah, I got it the first time…" The dragoness huffed, tenderly padding her wrist in her talons. She watched him delve back into the pod and waited curiously to see what would happen. "…So what's this war that you're in that doesn't involve Warfang?"

"None of your business." He called over the din of crackling fires nearby. There was so much smog clouding above them that she couldn't see the sky. The crater was bleeding up into the atmosphere. They would need to move soon, as undoubtedly Cynder would see that from her place in the clouds. "God damn it."

"Why do you keep saying that?"

"There's… _things_ missing." He rolled his wrist, items clattering around inside the unit as he doubled over and shoved everything from his mid-back and up into the darkened space within. **_Clunk~! _**–wrapped his head against the roof. "-_Son of a-!_"

The dragoness' wings fluttered and she giggled at him. Suddenly, a cool feeling running down her flank tickled her. She reached over and grimly peeled the leaf bandage off herself, wincing as coagulating, brown blood clung to it and her scales. She inhaled sharply when she saw what was underneath.

The wound was gone!

"-_What the- h-how-?!_" She stammered, kicking her rear legs and reaching over to run her paws over the purple scales there. Stained with blood as they were, the ragged holes had vanished. It was like nothing had happened. And she felt better too. Still sore, still woozy, but undeniably better. "-_Magic…_" –She whispered in awe.

"It's not magic."

Spyra gawked as his dark form stepped away from the asteroid unit. She blinked. His creamy skin was now covered in a black sleeve of reflective fabric. A pair of heavy rubberized boots with heel plating obscured his feet, and he held in his hands a device that was unlike anything she'd ever seen.

"W-What's _that?_" She gulped, nodding as she rose to her feet.

The human yanked back the bolt and squeezed his gloved fingers on the handle of the black weapon. It was vaguely ribbed, curvaceous, forming into a runic _L_ with its longer sheathe pointed up for the sky.

**_Ch-chung~! _**–went a mechanism inside, making Spyra yip.

"Technology." He confirmed with a tiny grin.

* * *

{🐉}


	9. Chapter 8 - Wreckage

**Dragon(s)layer**

**8**

* * *

**Wreckage**

* * *

_**{Black Mesa Soundtrack: Black Mesa Theme - Mesa Remix}**_

* * *

"If this were three years ago, and I had been told by an outside party about what I have witnessed here today, I would have scoffed that party with jubilant laughter and quite personal insults. Rue the day, though! Because guess what I saw? Inconceivable. Damn and _blast._ Do you know what this means, sir?"

Tinker stared at his chieftain with a wild expression. The mechanic was on the verge of drooling, his excited rants bouncing around the willow trees without pause or concern. Such was his impassioned, very vocal consideration, that he was completely ignorant to Visigoth's disdainful glare.

"It means that I garner _shame._" The massive Ape rolled his tusks, grimacing as one of his ugly assistants dressed the various claw-borne lacerations mottling down his muscular breast. In total, five other tribesmen were scurrying about with rags, buckets of cleaning water and bandage wraps. The fifth primate was meticulously unbolting and unhooking the various plates and chainmail skirts making Visigoth's attire, cooing in wonder at the baubles its lower caste hopelessly excluded it from ever owning. "That creature took me completely by surprise."

"Surprise indeed! Did you see how fast it moved? It was like greased lightning." Tinker breathed. Visigoth gnashed his cracked teeth and growled.

"Do you have your salve or not?"

"_Ah,_ yes of course." Tinker jumped and snatched a bottle hanging from one of the many belts tethered around his waist. The teardrop-shaped glass contained a clear, foul-smelling liquid inside that bubbled and popped, like seltzer water. "Capital that the beakers were cleaned properly just this morning. It's a fresh batch too! No stagnation whatsoever."

Visigoth used a thumb talon to pop the little cork off, before tipping his head back and draining the entirety of the contents with a few sordid gulps. He rumbled and dropped the bottle uncaringly at his feet, where Tinker scurried over to collect it. The Chieftain would never admit it, but he hated what was happening to his body. He was old. The oldest of the various Ape tribe Chieftains. He was being forced to rely more and more on Tinker's homebrew potions and elixirs.

"Well?" Tinker drummed his fingers expectantly on the glass, eyeing his lord like a chef awaiting a customer's word on his cooking.

Visigoth could feel the flesh reknitting as the elixir worked its literal magic. Tinker was the only Ape in the tribe who could forge potions, and Visigoth was the only Ape important enough to enjoy their benefits. Some of his assistants gave off tiny coos of wonder as they cleaned and groomed him, watching cuts seal themselves on their own accord.

"And the other?" The Chieftain rolled his jaw, tongue running over his shattered fangs.

"Here, sir." Tinker sounded a little disappointed as he unclipped a little vial from another belt. "You'll have to rinse this one around quite a bit, just enough to gather in every effected recess."

Visigoth tipped the vial's contents in and started to use it like one would use mouthwash. He snorted when actual steam started to build in his mouth, and his gums began to tingle. Tinker quickly waved a hand and mouthed- '_You have to keep your chops closed!' -_before stepping back.

The old Chieftain waited a moment and then swallowed. He ran his tongue testingly over his fangs.

Not a crack or break detectable.

"You work wonders, Tinker." Visigoth admitted quietly, nasally puffing away the last lick of steam. "However, restitched flesh and regrown teeth do not suffice for my shame. I was beaten in singular combat by a _dragon._"

"_Shame_ for encountering a beast of legend?" Tinker's yellow fangs were hidden just a second later as he realized the depth of his jocular intent. His monkey-grin was eviscerated when the look of an opened, overfed metal forge swam upon Visigoth's face like a writhing leech.

The Chieftain was so quick that the Ape died and Tinker didn't even know what had happened. The neck bones were always brittle, despite their species' bulk. The poor fellow never would understand that his life was ended purely out of Tinker's value. **_Crack~! _**–and the body that Visigoth had snatched and lifted three feet in the air jolted outwards, the worker's limbs extending like he'd been electrocuted.

Visigoth snarled and opened his fingers, letting his subordinate's corpse crumple at Tinker's feet like a strewn sack of scrap. The remaining four labor-chimps leaped back with startled hoots and screeches, their eyes wide with panic as they focused on their terrifying leader.

"Your mind is worth more than my pride." Visigoth trembled, him struggling to maintain any semblance of composure whilst he towered above Tinker. The defeat earlier today had driven him over a proverbial edge. Even the meekest slights were liable to drive him to kill. "So it is deemed by the Dark Mistress, voices with more sway than my own. But I swear on the lineage of our ancestors, Tinker, if you so much as humor a _snicker_ over my ordeal, I shall rip your spinal column out through your rectum."

"A-As you will, my lord." Tinker's monocle fell out and pattered somewhere on the dirt. He held up his paws and shrunk back, his filthy fur bristling like a startled cat's. "My sincerest apologies. I meant no offense even in the slightest. The weight, you see, of what we have uncovered has made me delusional and-"

"_Speak._" Visigoth howled, causing every Ape surrounding him to leap a foot in the air. The four workers tried to ignore the twitching corpse of their fellow and set back to work.

Tinker swallowed and chanced a final glance at the body. The worker's face was alight with surprise, over anything else. His fanged teeth were revealed in a silent, eternal cry of shock, his eyes open and wide, locked on the gray, soot-filled heavens above.

"Your patience is too gracious to remain with me." Tinker smartly admitted, forcing himself to look his master in the eye. "I will forgo any further unintended elongations of lore. But sir, this intruder that we have met today is a very unique sort of dragon_._"

"Obviously." Visigoth hissed, cleaning rags whispering against his fur. "Faster than most, and _slippery._ Quite content with life as a swamp-rodent. The creature is skilled at avoiding larger prey and striking where her foe is most vulnerable."

Visigoth grimly muttered with his ashen voice, his eyes running down the Ape he had murdered that lay between him and Tinker. He dared a painful smile and snorted laughter. "She is so much alike to the boar, my Beast of Rite as a pup."

"Your first step to chiefdom, my lord." Tinker bowed very low, until his palms were upon the dirt. "Over the course of fifteen nights and days you trekked the cold forests and brought home the largest bull ever slain in the history of our people. A mighty fight that you overcame through your grandeur and strength."

"Strength." Visigoth curled back his lips, snarling at his own hand as the mechanic's words sunk in. "Something that cannot falter in the face of a new enemy. Back then I had never encountered a boar the size of fifteen Apes, and while I failed many a time as I tracked that animal, I still succeeded. I nearly died."

"So too must the unfortunate trials of first contact, as they say; _prevail._" Tinker nodded enthusiastically. "You shall flay this dragon of her own skin during your next encounter."

"I have not tasted dragonflesh in weeks." Visigoth cast a loving blink towards the massive shoulder pauldrons that were polished by two of his servants nearby. Their vaguely elongated stances shown them as draconic pieces of armor. The open-faced helmets of two mighty Warfangian champions that Visigoth had beheaded each in individual combat. Both of those kills had been career heights since his people's tribes had been inducted into the Dark Mistress' armies.

It had been longer than the last time he had actually feasted on dragons stuck through spits. It was culturally significant for Apes to ritualistically eat the remains of fearsome foes. It was why Ape units in Malefora's armies had no such thing as the word '_prisoners'_ in their already limited vocabularies. Might made right. Those who lost to the stronger would nourish their betters. As was the way of nature and ultimately the way this world should be resculpted.

"Tell me of this dragon." Visigoth said. "What significance do you claim to know?"

"She is _purple._" Tinker stated, and Visigoth raised a brow. "It's the color of her coat. Northern legends all speak to a time of prophecy, where there might be a purple savior to spell the end of this war and rid the realms of evil."

"You're telling me that this she-drake is the foretold Purple Dragon of yore?"

"Capital! I could not have described it better myself." Tinker nodded. "_Yes_, sir. There is no such thing as a dragon with purple scales that is of any insignificance. My library is vast, much of it pilfered, and so it is not only my word, but the word of our enemies _and_ our more elusive allies."

"The wyrms up in the volcano." Visigoth nodded. "They all bear the same blood. Cynder has to know."

"Undoubtedly she already does, sir." Tinker stepped closer, cringing as he moved around the dead worker, and leaned close to Visigoth's imposing form. "The Mistress' fascination with the destruction of her foes was withheld! Did you witness her hunger? Madness, that! She'll tear this entire swamp apart before she allows the Purple Dragon to escape her clutches. If anything is to be said of prophecy, it is that that dragon will spell not only the Dark One's doom but _hers_ as well."

As if on cue, the ground trembled and a blastwave of dust washed from the clearing nearby. The atmosphere cracked under a high-pitched screech of indignant anger. Wood snapped, and Tinker flinched as a willow tree snapped at the base and was cast further into the swamp, like it was a weightless toothpick.

"Ah." Tinker reached down and plucked his monocle off the ground, squinting as he fixed it back over his eye. "The Mistress is upset."

"What gave _that_ away?" Visigoth sighed.

"_A Purple Dragon~!_" Cynder ranted, her black form sweeping into the clearing like a shadowy serpent. Her wings were extended, her breast pumped outwards, and a general appearance of flustered horror was present all down her body. "The largest hoard of Mana Crystals found in one spot, the closest I have come to possessing an instantaneous key to leaving this wretched swamp, was foiled by a _P__urple Dragon!_"

Cynder paused, heaving.

"I was _breathed upon_ in lesser-fire by a _P__urple Dragon~!_" She screamed hoarsely, making Tinker wince.

"_Ah,_ the crystals." The mechanic muttered lowly, earning a growl from Visigoth. "In all my excitement, I seem to have forgotten the original reason we had come here for."

"_Hey,_ guys! I found a piece!" –Called an Ape warrior nearby. He lifted his arm, a small, glowing green Mana-shard clenched in his fingers.

**_Pffffttt~! _**–a flash of magic and a rush of Cynder's Wind element sent the Ape flipping listlessly through the air, before he bounced raggedly off the flat of a tree trunk. The impact sounded like the very low, hollow report of a cannon.

Cynder's chops quivered as she dropped her combat stance and whipped around, resuming her pacing and snarling.

"I was unable to apprehend the creature, Mistress," Visigoth immediately voiced aloud, bowing slightly. "I have failed and suffer full responsibility."

"Forgo blame and dispatch your entire tribe." Cynder ignored him, her bladed, thick tail flicking as she made eye-contact. "And send a runner to Chieftain Jute. Tell him to send reinforcements and to sweep his horde through the southern border."

"My lady," Visigoth lowly growled. He _hated_ Jute and his backward bottomfeeders of Apes, but that wasn't his intent to voice. "the upper reaches of this bog are littered with _geyser formations. _Jute is a miscreant, but he won't risk bringing any of his infantry through."

"I don't need Jute's infantry." Cynder spat. "I need his _Dreadwings._ Your tribe is woefully understaffed in riders since the Dark Army was last ejected from the Dragon Realms."

"True." Visigoth begrudgingly nodded. His tribe had not faired well in the last attempted conquest of the forces of order. Being the tribe that specialized in infantry production had its tradeoffs. Malefora and Cynder always deployed Visigoth's boys as shock troops, and that usually entailed higher casualties.

The Chieftain barked, and a nearby Ape soldier scurried away on all fours to carry the order out.

"Are our intents to comb the entire swamp? The Dark One will be displeased if we depopulate the front lines. _And,_ do we not have to seek out the insect villages further towards the arctic waters? We need more slaves to process the crystals we still have faster."

"Don't you think I know all of that?" Cynder grumbled. She kept pacing, snorting furiously at the brooch hanging from her neck. "That attack from the sky, it _had_ to be the Purple Dragoness' doing." She cast an accusing glance at the rising, black smog coming from the asteroid impact site just nearby. Ashes were still raining everywhere and the sky was almost black as night. "My Mistress will charge me with her destruction the moment she learns of her existence, if she is not already aware."

"To cut what is foretold at the neck. Fortuitous!" Tinker chattered. "The prophecies never specified what would happen if their divine savior met with a premature, unfortunate accident."

"That is precisely what we must aim for." Cynder nodded. "The Dreadwings will allow us support from the air and will drastically aid in scouting. This swamp is so overgrown that my infantry formations might as well be wading through waist-deep mud."

Visigoth growled at Cynder's choice of words. _Her_ infantry formations. Pah. They were _his_ men of _his_ tribe. One day, Cynder would realize that very clearly.

"I will continue to search from the skies." Cynder eyed the blackened atmosphere for just a moment before her gaze sagged, and she appeared glossy. "… Chieftain Jute's flights will allow us to crush this little insurrection quickly."

"Yes, mistress." Visigoth grit his teeth, suddenly feeling like he was being compared.

Cynder's foul mood was breached with a silky laugh.

"Clean yourself up, Chieftain, and rally your men. Spread out the search and sweep the entire swamp until the Purple Dragoness is found. Oh, and have your engineer there assemble a work team to unearth the sky-object from that crater. I want it back at the Forlorn so that I may examine it more closely."

The black dragoness swept into the ash above and vanished in the blink of an eye.

"…She wants the asteroid?" Tinker drooled. Visigoth shook his head.

"Aye, and that is a prize your baboon fingers will have no place prying." He said. "Bide your patience, Tinker, one day Cynder will become so blinded by hubris that she'll make herself easy prey. Apes belong to Apes."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion OST- Peace Of Akatosh}**_

* * *

Spyra hopped on her leg, purposefully putting more pressure on it as she watched the sinewy muscles underneath her azure hide ripple and flex. She was prancing, like a pleased deer on her toes.

"I don't know how you did it," She tisked, smiling inanely at where the bloody gore-wounds previously had been. "but this leg feels good as new."

The dragoness giddily turned her gaze on the alien as he moved beside her.

"Spyra _likey~._" She growled playfully, making him glance at her for an unusually long time. "…What?"

"Nothing." He shook his head, kneeling behind a tree. He pointed the weapon he held- this _gun_ that he spoke of –past the tree's flank and scanned the peat bogs ahead. He noticed her staring at him.

"What are you doing, dude?" She sniffed, standing in the open path.

"Hope we run into more of them and I'll show you." He stated.

"Hell yeah, I can do with some payback time." She nodded, following him in a zig-zag between the peat puddles. He stepped near a fat toad, and the animal croaked, kicking mud flecks as it hopped its burly mass away from his foot in panic. "Hey, you know, you never told me your name."

"I don't… have one." He shook his head, cocking his chin as they reached the foot of a large incline of earth. It rose almost three stories up in the air, a cliff face riddled with hanging creepers and pockets of mushrooms sprouting from aged peninsulas. There was a willow tree the size of a castle growing from the far western flank just over their heads, it curled in the air like a big black vein and spread like a gigantic arboreal cloud at the tip.

One of its roots snaked as a natural walkway down to the peat bog they trekked. He put one foot on it, holding out his arms as he slowly started stepping up the wood plates and towards the surface above.

"So, let me just rewind everything I have on you so far;" Spyra sat on her haunches, watching him with lowered eyelids. "No name, no home, no _reason_ for a falling out of the sky, and a member of a race nobody has ever heard of. Did I miss anything?"

"Sounds quite on the mark." He muttered, halfway up the twisting, man-thick root. "And I told you the reason I fell out of the sky. It wasn't my choice."

"That's stupidly cryptic." She called up to him.

"People are dicks." The human shrugged. "Especially those who have power."

"_Yeah, I know~._" She purred. "After all, you must get so much attention wherever you're from to just brush off a dragoness in her prime such as myself. You know, other species are supposed to be in _awe_ by us and shit_._" She pointed to herself with her tail.

"Awestruck as I am, I'm afraid this is where I bid you _ado,_ Ms. Spyra." He reached the top, hopping off the root and looking back down at her from the top of the ridge. He looked almost regal, caught in the glare of the gray sky above from that height. "You seem to be walking quite chipper, and I have to be on my way now."

"You're not just leaving me here." She sweetly smiled. "If there's one thing I can take to heart about what my brother used to tell me: it's that I'm as bad as a _rash_, and proud of it."

"While that may be," He pressed the gun to his forehead and saluted her off, spinning around and walking north. "-sorry about the crash landing, but I have an army of evil monkeys to lead astray, so if you don't mind, I'll-"

Grass crunched right behind him. He glared over his shoulder as Spyra furled her wings back up and trotted alongside him wordlessly, still wearing that cocky muzzle-grin.

"_So,_" She happily looked up at him, her curvy body postered in confidence. "where to first?"

"Are you stupid?" He asked.

"Hey, fuck you too, homeslice." She winked. "So what are we doing to lead these people away from my home?"

"No. _No._ Nonono. _You're_ not doing anything_._" He waved his hand at her, gesturing with his gun back the way they had come. "You're going _that-a-way._ Now go. Shoo. Buh-bye. Nice knowing you. Just be sure to skirt around the slavering mob of monkeys."

"Ya' think we should blow something up? I _love_ explosions." Spyra hopped on her own heels, licking her teeth. "We could use the methane pockets deep underground! 'Cause I don't know if you noticed, but, uhm…" She coughed, and he jumped as a lick of fire swept past her teeth and highlighted the area for a brief second in brilliant amber. She smiled wider. "-I gots the _spice_ for it. You dig?"

"You're not mentally stable." He pointed.

"Look, I get you're not on the market for a traveling buddy, but I've been searching for a reason to get outta' this swamp since before I knew how to _count._" She stood up on her hind legs, surprising him as her front paws clasped his shoulders. The dragoness held herself up, her snout inches from his nose as her peculiar, spicy scent wafted in his face. "And now, you're the closest thing I have to answers as to what I'm going to do about a literal _army,_ that's coming after my family as a side dish. If you think you're walking away from me, you've got so much more coming."

The human appeared indecisive. For a moment, he considered pointing the gun at her, but, then again, she didn't know what this thing _did,_ and the last thing he wanted was to hurt her or worse. She wasn't his enemy. Far from it. He supposed the help they had afforded each other so far warranted at least some minute ratio of trust value...

But still, as was evident in everything he did, he could never go anywhere without the situation becoming astronomically more complicated.

….So…. what the hell did he do now?

Spyra sighed animatedly when indecision wracked his face. She tapped her talons on his shoulders and leaned back, scrutinizing him chin to forehead.

"The least you could do, after almost landing on my face in a death-rock, is take me with you." She raised a scaly brow.

"What about your village?"

"As long as we get those Apes away from them, they'll be fine. I'll find them later." She smirked. "Besides, they _know_ me. I'll reappear when it's best to."

He didn't know what that meant, but, his options were limited anyhow.

"How long have you been living out here?" He asked.

"_Too_ long, dude. I told you, since I was born." Spyra rolled her eyes, hopping off of him, her claws clicking back on the dirt. She looked over the rise they had crossed back at the peat bogs. From this height, a few miles of the lowland swamp were visible. They could see the crash site. It was a glowing, amber pustule in a sea of browns, tans and greens.

A black shape zigzagging through the forest canopies showed the identity of Cynder as she fanned out to find them. They could hear more Ape war horns drawling out on the wind.

"See over there? Past those foothills? My village is hidden in a valley on the far southern coast, but I've never actually seen the iceberg seas. After that, well…. nobody knows, not even our elders."

"And north? This _Warfang_ you lot keep mentioning?" He looked down at her, adjusting himself to view the scenery.

"That's where the _Dragon Realms_ are supposed to be. I've never been there."

"You were born out here?"

"Not here, no, but, ehm…" She gestured to a small breakage in the canopy past the foothills. The winding presence of what was very obviously a river snaked up northeast. "…my parents found me on _that._ That river, when I was in my egg, carried me downstream for miles until I washed up on the edges of my village. I was just in a basket."

"You were given up." He said sympathetically.

"I dunno'." She shrugged with her wings, snorting, and looking down at her paws. "-Anyway, none of that matters. I want to see the world and you can help me do that." She locked eyes with him. "If I have to beat an army of Apes to start that journey, then that's what I have to do. And besides, who else are you gonna' get so easily as a guide and battle-buddy?"

"_Battle-buddy._" He scoffed, shifting on his heels when she bumped him with her fleshy, scaly hip. "Have you ever fought before? In an actual battle?"

"I _love_ fighting!"

"That's a no." He smiled grimly, looking down at his sidearm. He ejected the magazine and counted the rounds inside. It certainly wasn't enough for any prolonged fighting, even for the tech-difference he enjoyed. He slapped the gun back together and sighed deeply. "Well, seeing as I have so few options available to me…"

Spyra sauntered up to his side and went to say something.

Then, he kicked her square in the chest. His heel made a thundering _thwack~! _–like sound as it rebounded off her golden plates.

Spyra tumbled clean off the cliff face, panicked, and couldn't get her wings in order fast enough, and plowed face-first into the swamp muck at the base of the cliff.

**_Splat~! _**–the dragon looked like a splayed-out, purple squirrel that had been run over by a car. Her tail daggered up from her ass like a lightning bolt, and her wings spread into the mud like two orange flaps of paper.

The human watched just long enough to see her twitch, before he took off in a sheer run.

_I'm sorry._

_Patpatpatpat-_ went his heels on the grass. Now that he wasn't obstructed by a mouthy dragon over his shoulder, or being followed, he could truly put to use his speed.

He dodged around trees, slid under mushroom clusters and hopped peat puddles, clearing tens of feet in under a minute. He shouldered through a thin foliage wall and emerged into a clearing, it was a long, sweeping canal that once might have been flooded.

The gigantic earth-trench spread as far as could be seen west and east, its northern banks lower and walkable, where they vanished into the feet of a second, thin line of woodland trees. He could see gray horizons beyond them. The land dipped and sloped just ahead. The walk would be torturous, but at least he wouldn't get that purple female killed-

**_Wham~! _**–the breath left his breast as something scaly slammed into the center of his back, right between his shoulders.

"-_Oooof~!_" –Was all he got out, before his face ate the dirt, and he and his assailant rolled in the dust.

He flipped around, blinking, and stared up at the horrible visage of _Spyra_. Her fangs were exposed, and her normally pretty, femininely draconic features were now dripping with mud. She had an expression of death written on her face as she pinned him, straddling him with her hind legs and tacking his shoulders with her surprisingly strong front paws.

"_What. The. FUCK. IS WRONG WITH YOU~?!_" –She screeched in his face, making his ears ring.

"-_tryin' to save your life-!_" He kicked her in the stomach and sent her flying backward. This time, however, her wings didn't fail her.

He jumped to his feet and started running again, glancing back just in time to witness the dragon's wings spread out like a tapering kite and catch her very body on the breeze. She aligned her paws with the dirt and started to drift down serenely, like a snowflake.

But then, her eyes lit with rage, and fire seeped past her teeth as she angled her breast down, and zipped on an air current, dive-bombing herself right for him.

_Shit, she's agile._

* * *

_**{Assassin's Creed 2 OST: Wetlands Combat}**_

* * *

"-_I'm gonna' kick you in your dangly balls~!_" Spyra hollered, missing her mark only by inches, landing right in front of his path and bracing her wings in front of her like battering rams. He skidded to a halt, heaving as he backed up. "And just when I was starting to like you, spaceman!"

"I don't need you to like me, I need you to _leave_ me, you purple iguana!" He countered, jabbing an accusatory finger at her. "The last time I sucked people up into the madness that is my life, they all got fried, or they left with very sore souls and amputations."

Spyra growled like a dog, ripping her claw through the dirt like a bull getting ready to charge. She lowered her head and brandished the brass-colored, wicked points of her horns. He had no doubt that those heavy implements could pierce metal if she worked up enough of a run.

"Wait a minute, let's discuss this-"

"-_Fuck you!_" Spyra barked, barreling into a charge.

The human clenched his fists and bent onto his knees.

Spyra was going to kick his ass. All he had proven capable of was running away from everything dangerous so far. Things that ran away couldn't fight. Spyra hated the lack of challenge, but she didn't _need_ it in the interest of revenge.

He got mud on her beautiful scales! Bastard alien.

Spyra jolted forwards, aiming for his ankles, but to her astonishment: she hit nothing!

Skidding in the dirt, the dragon looped around, wide-eyed, to see the human recovering from a spin on a placed heel. He steadied himself, facing her with his knees lowering slightly, just as before.

"Listen to me," He held up his hands. "I don't want to fight you. I'm sorry I kicked you down the ravine... I... I kind of hoped you'd be out for a little longer..."

"Some apology that one." Spyra snorted soot and spit embering mud from her chops. "Why so desperate to be alone for?"

"It's not to be alone, it's to keep you from getting hurt." He defended stoically. "I'm not even supposed to be here. This is your world, and you seemed to be doing pretty fine before I came crashing down. If you stick around me, you stick around with everything that's currently trying to kill me, and judging by those monkeys, the list just got bigger."

"I can take care of myself!" Spyra cried. "First it's my parents, my damn soap-maker and now _you!_ When is everyone gonna' get that I'm a big fuckin' girl?"

"I never said you weren't." He creased a brow. "In fact, you're big enough for me that if I wasn't in a rush I just might make a move."

"Y-You asshole!"

A jet of flame shot out of her mouth. The human jumped and tucked into a roll as the fire singed everything just behind him. The battlefield was a wide-open space. There was nowhere for him to run or hide.

Spyra sprinted after him, snapping her fangs at his leg, but the human was quick, he yanked his limbs out of the way each time her jaws clamped or her claws swiped. At one point, he staggered back from a near hit and she took the opportunity to spring like a squirrel and latch over his chest, just like she had done with Visigoth.

Snarling, she tried to hook her claws into his jumpsuit. The human snaked his arms around her gut and her back, heaving in a trained swing as he grappled and tossed her away. Spyra flipped and skidded on her claws, growling at him.

"You've got skill, I'll give ya' that." She spat into the dirt. "Practice much?"

"Stop!" He barked, again, holding his hands up for peace. "I don't want to fight you!"

"Maybe you shoulda' thought of that _before_ kicking me off a cliff! What the actual fuck is wrong with you, dude? You don't _hit girls!_"

"I-It's not a highlight of my career, I admit it." He swallowed. Spyra cried out a challenge and bounded at him again. "-_Waitwait-!_"

She sprung into the air and brought around her tail in a slashing move. The human tucked his knees and it went harmlessly over his shoulders. He came back with an attempt to grab her. Spyra flapped her wings and sent him flying in the resulting air-vortex. He barked as he hit the dirt hard.

He made to scramble to his feet, but Spyra was quicker. The human's pupils shrunk to the size of pins as Spyra's distant cry became louder and louder, and a shadow grew to eventually blot out the cloudy sun.

He cursed and rolled, Spyra plowing a heel into the dirt where his head had been.

"Damn it." She growled.

"I didn't try to kill you!" The human shouted, jumping to stand himself up. "Could you just calm down for five seconds so I can-"

"_-Hee-yah~!_"

**_Slap~! _**-she spun in midair and slashed him across the cheek with her tail tip.

"-_Agh-!_" The Fallen staggered back, holding his face. "-Jesus Christ, _time out!_"

"Don't piss off a 'ness!" Spyra snapped, lowering her stance and creeping closer to him like a predator moving in for the kill. "There ain't no time outs for instigators!"

"I'm sorry I kicked you off the ledge! I thought it would... stop you..." The human rolled his jaw and spat. "...I'm just trying to keep you from getting into something you'll later regret."

"I can make the decision of what's too much for me for myself, thanks, _daddy._" Spyra snorted. "Why do ya' think I'm out here to begin with? That black dragon, Cynder? Her and her Apes are up to some bad mojo in _my swamps._ I can't just stand by after what I saw! If something happens to the swamp, it impacts my home!"

"I respect that," The human nodded cautiously, still tensed in case she came at him again. "and based off what I've seen, I'm tempted to help you and your people. But helping doesn't mean anything if you get killed trying to go with me."

"And aren't you afraid that _you_ might get killed?"

"Spyra," Her blood chilled when he said her name. "this wouldn't be the first time I've crashed into the middle of people fighting each other."

"Well, how was I supposed to know that?" She blinked.

"You weren't." He frowned. "I'm sorry that you feel so trapped here, but I promise you that going with me to wherever I end up going is a far more perilous option. We don't even know each other!"

"You grapple well enough." She edged a brow. "Good enough of a first impression for me."

He paused for a long moment. Then, the human laughed at her.

"...Funny." He chortled.

"Ain't I just a plum?"

"Don't you mean a _peach?_"

"They're related!"

The smiles they each wore slowly slid off their faces when they realized they were both still in combat poses. He cleared his throat and relaxed on his heels, Spyra following suit a second later.

"I'm sorry, I really am, for attacking you." The alien stepped closer. "It was unjustified and I panicked in the moment. I've had people try to accompany me in the past, and when talking didn't dissuade them, and they journeyed me... they got hurt very badly. Some of them lost their lives."

"...I mean, I appreciate the concern and all that shit." Spyra sniffed, wiping mud off her face. "But off a _cliff?_ Really?"

"I-" He knelt in front of her and sighed, using a thumb to wipe off some mud from her long face. "...let me at least find you some water so I can get all this gunk off you."

Spyra grumbled, but let him dote on her as she in turn leaned closer and examined his peculiar facial features. She reached a paw up and ran her thumb-pad over one of his eyebrows, smiling at the tickling sensation of its hairs brushing against her.

"What're these for anyhow?" She grinned quietly, her wings settling behind her as tension bled out of the air.

"Eyebrows." He mused. "Nobody around here has them too?"

"_No._" She giggled. "..._huh, hu-mans..._" -She rolled the word on her tongue, muttering with a fascination for him. "You ever touch a dragon before?"

"Few times." He seemed deep in thought. His eyes dilated and he snorted, quickly standing and tearing their interaction apart.

"Hey..." She sadly reached up for his browline.

"No more fighting?" He asked.

"...Wha-? _Yeah, _yeah no more fighting." Spyra sat on her haunches and blinked at him. "...Wow, you're like, really _tall._"

"Taller than you, short-stuff." He winked. _Bing! _And there went her temper tangent.

Spyra growled.

Then a black ball of energy landed in between them and exploded!

There was a deafening bang and a mushroom cloud of dust. Spyra screamed as she flipped backward and skidded further towards the north of the basin. The human cried out as he sailed and then landed on his back.

"-_There you are~!_" Cynder sang. The black dragoness landed in the embering remains of her Shadow blast, sweeping away the dust devils with but a flick of her crimson wings. "I have you right where I want you, purple thing!"

"_Not you again~!_" Spyra groaned from the dirt, flipping to her heels and snarling. "Get out of my way, you emo-whore, I gotta' kick that _tall_ alien's ass!"

_Speaking of ass,_ the human thought, his eyes bulging as he tried to sit back up, and wound up getting a full underside view of Cynder's magnificently sculpted, feral backside.

She was facing away from him- evidently, unconcerned with anything that didn't involve Spyra –and from his end, he could see the base-thick, winding termination of her tail, a pair of meaty haunches that would drive even humanoid women to teeth-gritting tears of frustration, and a belly paunch obviously pronounced for the carrying of eggs just ahead of the muscular, fatty highway of her tail's crimson underside.

Prior experiences rewound themselves in his head. One had to understand that this certainly wasn't the first time he'd found himself in such a peculiar stance with the natives of a place.

The human's jumpsuit felt very tight all of a sudden.

_I always pick the worst of times._

Cynder craned her long neck over her wing to regard him, her white eyes blooming in shock as he worked to his feet and stood before her, teetering as he struggled to tear his eyes off her rear.

"_Oh?_ The Lonesome One has a companion, I see. And who might _you_ be, my very strange, fleshy friend?" Cynder grinned cruelly.

"Ass. _AwshitImean-_" He stammered, gripping his hair and tugging.

_What is wrong with me? No! Not again!_

A rosy smell hit his nose, his very nostrils quivered, and he staggered backwards and away from the tantalizing reptile taking up most of his vision.

_It's- It's-_

"_Hmmph~. _I shall deal with you later." Cynder swept the flat of her tail blade and swatted the human away, her eyes self-consciously gracing over her haunch for but a second.

_Crack~! _–went the metal to his ribs. He spun like a top and landed some distance off in a plume of dust, coughing, shaking his head and looking up, just in time to see tens of whooping, hollering Apes sliding down the canal's incline that he and Spyra had come from.

"Now, I believe you and me have unfinished business." Cynder licked a talon and started sauntering closer to the smaller dragoness. "That flame that you bathed my visage in? I do not approve."

"Aw, shove it, lady." Spyra huffed, following her example and helping to close the distance. "At least there's a modicum of respect here this time. While we're on the subject, lemme' just say that your recruitment policies suck dick, and that my great-grandma could lead an army better. And she had dust in her chitin."

"Best hen wins the day." Cynder raised a brow, leaning down as the two angry reptiles merged foreheads with a rough _clack_ of impact, and growled at each other like hounds.

"Bring it on. I'll have them bury you with your cutting razors and mascara collection."

"_Mud-rat_." Cynder finally gave into her temper, pressing the merger farther into Spyra's face, her paws digging into the soil and leaving raking marks. "_Dirty swamp-heathen._"

"Stupid Goth-bitch!" Their horns clacked and Spyra backed her up a step, the two dragons' powerful muscles tensing as they struggled.

"Lowly peasant!"

"_Narcissistic cave-bomber!_"

"Scrawny little skank!"

"_Tattooed sex-object!_"

"_Pink ground-newt!_"

"_-W-What~?! Rawr~! I. am. not. PINK-!_"

Spyra tackled her and the two reptiles tumbled, dust flying, claws descending and teeth gnashing. Despite the fact that Cynder was nearly twice Spyra's size, the purple dragoness was giving her a run for her money. Blood leaked from slash wounds and bite marks. The females roared, howled, hissed and screamed as they tore into each other, limbs swinging, tails whipping and wings flexing.

The poor human was left to gawk at the spectacle, turning especially pale as the tussle cleared through the dust, and the pair landed at his feet with a mighty -_thud~!_

Cynder was straddling Spyra, both of their hiplines presented with tails flaring and raised. His eyes almost rolled out of his skull as he witnessed a pair of two very anatomically correct dragon-groins just inches above one another, one golden and the other crimson. All the exertion made both wyrms glisten with a thin coating of sudor covering their fleshy fat.

"Now I get it." Apes were running up behind him, swinging axes and clubs, but he didn't mind just yet. He cast an accusatory glance up at the sky and grit his teeth. His enemies had dropped him here on purpose. "Now I get why you all chose _here._"

He snatched up his gun from his jumpsuit hem, gracing the two-dragoness war a final, longing glance.

"When in doubt," He raised the pistol at the encroaching Apes. "-use a distraction."

* * *

{🐉}


	10. Chapter 9 - Apebane

**Dragon(s)layer**

**9**

* * *

**Apebane**

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Swamp Tense}**_

* * *

Grappling with Cynder was one thing, becoming so startled by the sudden shriek of noise was another entirely. Both dragonesses paused in a final, bone-crunching halt in the dirt. Spyra looked past her opponent's flank and Cynder gazed down her slender spine, both seeking the origin of the horribly loud sound. It had all the grace and volume of thunder and the roar of a cannon. It was the device held in the scrawny human's hand.

The weapon kicked whilst a millisecond of white light bloomed from its muzzle. A flickering, bronze casing rebounded off to his flank. The gun bucked and one of the Apes running down the slope tossed head over heels, a liquidy trail of crimson globules cartwheeling from a wound that had appeared in the center of his skull.

If perturbed by the ferocity of the thing pointed at them, the other primates didn't show it. They trampled their fellow's corpse and advanced on the human, swinging axes and swords. Cynder was initially impressed with the fearlessness of her soldiers.

"God, they're stupid." Spyra grumbled underneath her, wiping the pride off Cynder's face in an instant as she was reminded of the sick truth.

"Your mysterious ally will perish shortly." Cynder reapplied pressure through her forearms promptly, the purple dragoness squeaking as her biceps quivered. The two were locked at the paws. Cynder was trying to bring the merger down and crush Spyra under her weight. "Where my minions falter in quality, they assure victory in _quantity._"

"Mountains of shit will still burn." Spyra grit her teeth, buckling under the duress. Despite her size in comparison to Cynder, she was still a dragon. Their kind possessed a strength that could outdo most. Cynder would have no easy time flattening her. "If this is the best you can do, then you need some help, lady. Do they have war-coaches where you come from? Your tactics suck."

"_Shut up._" Cynder snarled. "How dare you pelt me with your lowly mewling. Insults all screamed from the foul mouth of a plebian and muck-swimmer. You don't even understand how far you have set back my campaign by destroying all of those Mana Crystals in the cave."

"Y-You think that was _me?_" Spyra shut her eyes as the pain in her arms became unbearable. She pinched her an eye open, seeing her alien jogging backward, the gun in his grip kicking again and again and again as he poured the weapon's fury into the advancing mob of Apes. To Spyra's horror, after the eighth shot, the weapon clicked and ran dry.

She heard him curse as the first Ape stormed over the bodies of its comrades, an axe raised over its ugly head.

"Do you know what Apes do to those who put up a substantial fight?" Cynder leaned closer, licking her teeth right in front of Spyra's sweat-drenched nose. "They _eat_ them."

"That's alright, I was gonna' eat him myself a few minutes ago." Spyra grunted. "Guy kicked me down a ledge."

Cynder raised a brow as her quarry continued on with such conversation despite the… _circumstances._

It was that pause that threatened to undo everything. Cynder barked and reeled from her murderous efforts. Spyra had slipped her rear legs out and drummed them on the larger dragon's breast until belly-plates started to crack. Cynder had no more than a second before a purple blur smacked into her chest, and again they tumbled.

The human's endeavor, meanwhile, wasn't so straightforward. Needless to say, as the axe came down for his head, he could at least admit that this wasn't the first time death had tongue-kissed him. While the prospect of dying didn't always seem so foreign, something about letting a _monkey_ end his journey didn't sit well in his gut.

He jerked to the side and let the axe slice past him. The Ape- with a look of bewilderment –turned his head and howled in frustration.

The human responded by pistol-whipping the barbarian right on the nose, breaking it with a muffled crunch. The Ape screamed and tossed back, holding his muzzle and dropping his axe at his attacker's feet.

_It's better than nothing._

The human ducked and a club run-through with rusty nails sailed over his shoulders. He dropped the empty pistol and grabbed up the crude axe in his hands, rising up as rushes of stinking fangs and screaming baboon throats surrounded him.

The Apes came as a foul-smelling tsunami of unkempt fur and muscle. His new axe was weighty and required two hands, its original master leaving his mark as damp palm-sweat upon the handle.

The human grit his teeth as a very familiar rush overtook his veins and drowned his senses. He brought the chiseled heft of the axe in an upwards swing, his thin arms bulging whilst he buried it to the hilt in an Ape's guts.

Blood stringed out and stained the dirt and his jumpsuit, the human twisting with a vicious cry leaving his lips. He shouldered into the Ape's muscular form and tore him from the axe's teeth. Another blade cut vertically down his back in the pause, opening his jumpsuit like paper, and panting everything from his center spine to his waist in his own blood. The cut was painful but thin.

The human screamed and looped around, burying the axe in his assailant's throat with a cracking swing. He fell with the corpse and the Apes piled on. What followed was a series of whoops, hollers and warcries. Flesh squelched and bones cracked.

"-_Kill 'im!_" –One of the Apes yelped, before a spear lodged through his eye socket and punched out the rear of his skull.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Didn't they outnumber this pink, fleshy thing, like, twenty to one?

The monkeys couldn't quite process what was occurring, as, after all, what chance did a single, scrawny little runt like that have against a mob of tough fellows like them?

"What are you lot doin'?! Just pin the thing down and cut it-" –The Ape officer tumbled back with a sword lodged in his guts. The human followed him down, snarling like a dog and twisting as entrails erupted around the shanty blade-like torrents of syrupy magma.

"My Mistress does not fear you, and neither do I." Cynder's tail slapped across Spyra's belly as she made to leap, cutting off the maneuver to send her rolling across the dirt. "You will be crushed by the might of the Dark Army!"

Spyra was like a cat. It was almost impossible to keep her down. Still, Apes that strayed from the engagement with the alien were not against trying. A cluster of them descended on her the moment she gained distance from their mistress, like carrion birds on a freshly dropped corpse.

Spyra tumbled through the dirt when an Ape swung a chipped cleaver- missed –and instead opted to bear-hug and tackle her. Her newer opponent was obviously less graceful and less hygienic. Spyra gagged as his furry abs brushed her snout, and his filthy gods-who-knew-where-they've-been paws grabbled and tugged at her throat. The Ape's face was twisted in this ecstatic moment of excited screaming.

"_Strangle-strangle-! Oooo-Ahhahahahahaaa~!_" –He laughed maniacally, getting her eyeballs to bulge as he found a good grip on her neck and compressed, cutting off the dragoness' breath.

Spyra gurgled some horrible insult aimed at his mother. Her rear legs doggy-paddled across his stomach, the talons adorning her toes shredding flesh easily.

The Ape's laughing turned into horrible, high-pitched shrieking. Still, his paws didn't let up off her throat, so she kept slicing and kicking. Something leathery ripped, and it felt like someone had dumped a bucket of warm water across her belly and hips. The Ape's fanged mouth was ajar as he died on top of her, panicked wheezes fading into an obscure pattern of hacks that eventually fell completely silent.

She kicked the corpse away, cursing as she looked between her legs and stared in horror.

Her feet were entangled with the dead fucker's intestines!

She'd really let herself go.

_Never piss off a 'ness._

She was peeling the limp sausage-like wads away when two more Apes surrounded her. Spyra gasped as clubs sailed down for her prone form.

However, they never connected. Something blurred right over where she was and tackled the monkey-warriors before they could even process what was happening.

Animalistic yowls echoed from the Apes. Spyra sat up and saw the alien, the human, with his hands wrapped around a stolen machete blade. He was bobbing it in and out of an Ape's stomach, ruining the fleshy structure there until fountains of blood spattered his chest and his victim's chainmail.

Her jaw dropped.

Their fight before hadn't looked anything like that.

_Are all of his people that vicious?_

Cynder's mighty paw gripped her throat, ushering out a squeak from Spyra. She was lifted off the ground and hoisted into the air, her eyes bugging as she saw the black dragoness standing on her rear two legs, her curvaceous body entwined in a quadruped stance. Cynder's face portrayed an expression of wanton hatred.

"You little _bitch._" The Cloud Ripper sneered as Spyra squirmed, clawed and flapped her wings.

"-_Aaaaaaaahhhhh~!_" –Screamed the human. A pink-fleshed blur impacted Cynder's midsection and sent her and her attacker careening. Spyra flipped once and landed on her backside in the dust.

"-_Hey~! _I had it under control! She was done for. I didn't need your help-" Spyra coughed. She swung her gaze about to take in what appeared to be a _field of bodies._

Tens of Apes, no less than twenty, lie in various states of uneasy sprawling and tumbles. Blood decorated the dust in spattered highways and veins. Mouths were ajar and dribbling ruby rivers. There was an Ape in the back of the ruination that had died standing up, his own spear having been run through his chin and out his temple.

"Holy _shit._" –Was all Spyra could say.

"_Get off of me, worm~!_" Cynder howled, striking madly and kicking at the smaller humanoid entangled over her crimson chest. "_Someone help me get this-_"

Cynder faltered as she looked up for aid. She saw her Apes and her struggling lowered.

"Nobody," The breath left her when a hand gripped the bridge of her snout and dipped her lower, the human smacking their foreheads together as he glared. "_is coming to help you._"

Cynder coughed, her white eyes locked with the human's drab-centered and smaller ones. Her teeth chattered as her gaze lowered down the hand and arm holding her face. It stopped at the alien's other arm, where he had buried one of her Ape soldiers' blades deep into the armored flesh of her once unmarred and beautiful breast.

The blade was longer than his forearm, and it was embedded halfway to the hilt, rich, draconic blood bubbling out around the metal and running down her purple-black rib scales in tiny canals.

A terrifying grin spread across her muzzle. The human snarled as she gripped the back of his hairy head, and shoved their faces together. His arm quivered whilst she clenched over his fingers and began a slow, agonizing process of sliding the blade from her flesh, unnatural energies birthed from their contact swirling in her guts. She moaned sharply when the metal slugged free of the ragged welt in its wake. It dripped with vital gore from where it had punctured her great sternum, ripping muscles aside and glancing bone.

"How _fearsome~._" She whispered in agony. Her wings flapped and she kicked him free, him landing in an unsteady stagger.

Cynder wobbled to her feet with a pained whine, still wearing her insidious smile as the alien and Spyra stood side-by-side before her.

"We'll talk later about that _short-stuff comment__._" Spyra grumbled to him.

The human didn't respond. He had wild eyes now, and they were locked on Cynder. She possessed the blade he had stabbed her with. The she-drake clenched it awkwardly in her larger paw, her fingers never designed to mesh with the crude craftsmanship of her Ape warriors.

Cynder stared the human down with an essence of glee about her. She had almost forgotten about the purple nightmare just standing off to the side. She brought the blade to her snout and dragged her impossibly long, serpentine tongue up and down the metal sheathe until it was cleaned of her blood.

"I _like_ you~." Cynder pointed the weapon at him. Spyra looked repulsed. The human was unreadable.

"You think _you_ were the first one he stabbed with that thing?" Spyra slapped her chops with distaste, glancing at the various dead Apes decorating the dirt around them. "I hope you get herpes."

"_You_ were not here before the purple dragon and I met." Cynder spoke between exhausted breaths. Again, one could've stared in awe at the display of draconic endurance. She was completely oblivious to the torrents of rich blood pouring like thick syrup from the gaping wound in her chest. Covered in grime, sudor and blood, both of the reptiles gleamed no less beauty than they had unspoiled. "You are a creature of the sky. Tell me, where do you come from and how did you summon the power of a comet?"

"I've been askin' the same questions for hours." Spyra sneered at her, pacing beside the human to look up at his face. He was really twisted, sporting an expression little different from that of Cynder's earlier. It was just… _hatred._ She coughed, remembering all the bodies. "…Where'd you learn to fight like that…"

"Your companion isn't the only one thirsty for answers." Cynder huffed. "_Speak,_ foreigner! You possess great ability and you will give to me your skill whether you want to or not."

"You want what I got?" The human spoke suddenly, making them both blink. He took a step forward, and Cynder stepped _backward. _"All I gave you is a scratch. There is nothing stopping you from coming right back to me."

Spyra backed away too. This was… _darker_ than she had initially viewed him as. Was this always how he was? How he _really_ was? Had everything from the landing site until now been a façade?

"Magic." Cynder observed quietly. She bowed her snout and dropped the knife, letting it clatter on the dirt. Her white eyes darted from his face, to his chest, and then- oddly –to his… _legs._

Or, maybe his crotch?

Spyra gawked.

_What the fuck is that all about? _She quirked a brow.

"You're possessed by some kind of _magic._" Cynder sounded redundant as he advanced on her. She could feel something brewing inside her, something from him touching her. It was a feather in her bloodstream, minute and growing by the second. "How are you doing this,? I was raised from the egg as a living weapon. I am immune to magic, my mind is tempered for it."

"You can't temper me." He specified angrily, standing before the dragoness, right between her front paws. Cynder was frozen, and Spyra was captivated by the sudden strength she could feel in the very air itself. What in the world was happening right now?

"What _are _you?" Cynder gasped, her voice changing, her body quivering as the human reached out a hand. "D-Don't touch me! Get away from me!"

"_Make me._" He growled, his palm compressing to the plate that he had stabbed. Cynder jolted and a cry left her, like someone had compressed a hot iron to her flesh. The Cloud Ripper hunched and curled her long tail between her legs, her mouth opening. Tremors rolled down her limbs and the sweat glistening off her scales only gathered in volume. The energies from his touch broiled like a tsunami inside her body.

"Y-You," The black dragon stammered, swallowing. "-are a _violator!_"

The human looked up at her, right into her eyes, and he laughed sharply.

"I like you too." He placed a second hand on her chest. "How about I stab you in your dragon-canal next, but this time with my _special_ blade?"

_Wat._

The purple dragoness had heard enough.

"-_Hee-yah~!_" Spyra's foot flung out and connected with Cynder's face.

There was a crunch and the black dragon roared in pain, reeling. Spyra landed next to the startled human and laughed.

"Nice job with the mind games." She complimented.

"...Thanks." He glumly muttered, appearing disappointed.

A Poison bolt zipped at them, and both companions barely avoided its blast as they rolled out of the way.

Cynder thundered the ground between them and hoisted onto her rear legs. Her wings spread and what started as a low whistle of wind turned into the howl of a tornado.

The black dragoness spun gracefully sideways, as if she was turning in a translucent tube over their heads. A vortex of white, stark Wind began to form around her like a giant dust devil.

Spyra hollered as she was sucked off the ground and swung through the air. The human clawed at the dirt but was similarly swallowed by the vortex. They each swung around the center cone twice, their senses whipped and vertigo taking hold in their guts.

Cynder shrieked and the vortex dissipated with a _crack! _-of magical sound. The human rolled through the dirt and Spyra landed on her belly.

"Heel, worms." Cynder righted herself, snarling between the two of them. "I will not be toyed with."

The black dragon turned her snout to Spyra.

"You have no idea what it is you have started."

The human snatched an Ape's blade, and fire spewed from Spyra's mouth. Dust kicked and dirt crumbled. Cynder's wings flapped and she shot into the gray sky above, vanishing just as quickly as she had appeared.

One of the dead Apes shifted and rolled onto his face from the breeze. But after that, all was still, and the battle was concluded.

Spyra forced herself to tear her eyes off the human's back. She watched Cynder gracefully fly off to the west, parallel to where they had originally been fleeing to. She could see that the black dragon was looking past her bleeding chest back at them.

"…Yeah…" Spyra cringed, not knowing what else to say. "…that's right, _run, _run in fear. So, uhm… w-we showed them, huh?"

The human lowered his arms and snorted. He stepped to one of the bodies, nudged it over with his foot, and picked up the expended gun that was lying underneath it. He shoved the pistol into the hem strap of his lower jumpsuit, which was now torn, stained with dirt and blood. It was ragged too, exposing several creamy strips of his body and limbs underneath. He took out one of those regen-injectors and deposited a drop via a quick jab on his wrist.

"I'm glad you're on my side at least." She grew sheepish when his gaze fell on her. Spyra shrunk back as the human stepped up to her, looming over her silently in the din of the dirt canal around them. "…You're still on my side, right?"

"I'm sorry that I kicked you." He reached down and wiped a speck of Ape blood off her cheek with his thumb. She winced from the contact and shied back, her tail whipping up a frenzy. "Come on."

He spun around and started walking back towards the treeline ahead.

"Wait a second, aren't you gonna' try to stop me again? Throw me in another ravine? Bury me alive, or, anything?" Spyra didn't follow him. "Aren't you gonna' use those murder-moves I just saw you wipe out an entire battalion with on me?"

"I tried to stop you, you came anyway." He turned around, walking backwards, and shrugging at her. "I would never use '_Those moves' _on someone who isn't my enemy. You wanted to see what I'm all about? There's a taste. You still want the complete package?"

She opened her mouth but faltered, no answer coming forth.

Soon, he was far enough away that he had to call to her.

"It's your choice." –He said, leaving her with the corpses.

As soon as he breached a few thickets and merged back into the woodlands, he heard plants rustling right behind him, and something heavy traipsing through the undergrowth.

Smiling, he glanced over his blood-speckled shoulder and watched as Spyra cautiously trotted to stand even beside him, walking on all fours as always, but with her head bowed, her purple eyes fixed on his boots.

"You good?" He asked. She nodded a little bit. "Good."

_Patpatpat-_ went their heels in the grass and weeds. It felt like forever had gone by before she spoke again.

"What did I do to get you to pop into my life?" Spyra asked, looking up at him with her inquisitive gaze.

"I dunno'." He shrugged, wiping snot from his nose as the adrenaline started to fade from his system. His muscles hurt, but that was a problem easily dealt with over time. At least neither of them were seriously injured. "Do you fancy yourself a Bible-thumper or a sinner?"

"What's a _Bi-ble?_"

"A load of shit." He noticed her curious gaze and shook his head. "-Just, nevermind."

"Aight'." The dragoness meekly nodded and stared at their feet again. She eventually nudged a little closer. "Hey, human?"

"Yeah-"

She reared back her front arm and punched him square in the crotch.

"-_Pff-ooofff~!_" –He grunted, doubling over and falling to a knee in agony. Spyra rasped through her chops and rolled through the weeds, laughing hysterically and spitting embers. "…_God-_damnit-_thatfuckinghurt-_" –He snarled through grit teeth.

"_That's_ for kicking me into the mud, and calling me short." Spyra zipped to her feet, bumping his sweaty temple with her lizard-like head. "It'll take a lot more than some dead monkeys to scare me away. I'm not afraid of anything."

"I was right," He breathed, rubbing tenderly at his groin as she pranced past him like a happy deer. "you're out of your mind."

"And _you_ aren't? Mr. Blood-fetish-with-the-evil-dragoness?" She shot back. "What was that, dude? You like… used psychological warfare on her and shit. Do you… do you really have _magic_ channeling through you?"

"No." He said, struggling to his feet and dusting himself off. "But you people are the reason I was sent here. At least that much I know now."

"So, is that like a bad or a good thing?"

"It depends on who you're asking."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon OST: Small Valley}**_

* * *

The warhorns didn't stop even as the afternoon morphed into the evening. Apes flooded into the swamps from the Forbidden Funguswood.

"Part of me has always wanted to go in there. My family spends a lot of time telling me to stay away from it, and that all kinds of bad things are happening underneath the mushrooms." Spyra said. "I've never actually gotten _proof_ of anything before though. Cynder flew off into that mess, and that's where the Apes are coming from. I bet if there's a camp, or a village or even a fortress that the bad guys have around here, it's there."

"Have you ever gone into the… what did you call it? _Fungus-wood?_" He asked, swatting mosquitos from his face as they trekked through a depression filled with stagnant water. Spyra's scales kept her safe from them. But despite his apparent badassery that he had in melee combat, the human had way too many soft points for the overeager insects to possibly resist trying to get a meal. Their conversation was intermitted with wet slaps as his hands swatted over every limb and tear on his suit.

"Not deep inside, nah. It's too dark, even for a dragon. _Well,_" Spyra gulped and glanced at the darkening sky, remembering Cynder. "-_almost_ any dragon. Where are we going anyway?"

"_I_ was going north."

"And now where are _we_ going?" She smiled smartly.

"_We_ are going north."

"_North~?!_" Spyra shrieked, jumping in front of him and placing her front paws on his chest, her tail wagging like an excited dog. "We're going to _Warfang?_ Please tell me we're going to Warfang."

"You said that's the only city around here anyone talks about, right?" He quizzed, leaning his head back from how close her snout was. "Where there are cities, there's people. Where people congregate, is where they keep the best technology and the brightest minds. Off we go then."

"I get to meet the dragons." Spyra gasped, plopping back down from his chest and staring at him with wonder. "_I get to meet the dragons!_"

"You _are_ a dragon." He raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, but I'm a lonely ass hick dragon who's always been by herself!" Spyra cheered. "Not anymore! I get to find my people! _And,_ I got a crazy bad-ass alien to walk me all the way there."

"I'm _human,_ not an alien."

"Alien to me." Spyra bumped him with her purple hip, chuckling. "But anyways _alien,_ we make an awesome team, you and me."

"Yeah, _awesome._" He sniggered. "You want to help us find an _awesome_ shelter for the night?"

"There's a cave right over this hill, it's hidden in a clearing." She pointed with her wingtip. "C'mon, I'll show you!"

"Why is it always a cave?" He sighed.

"You don't like caves?"

"I hate caves." He shuddered, tossing his looted Ape blade into the air, letting it spin, before he caught it by the hilt. "Rarely have good experiences in caves."

"I _love_ caves." Spyra countered musingly. "You can find a lotta' cool shit in caves. Glowing fungus, glowing bugs, _giant_ bugs, earthworms the size of your leg and Poisonfly maggots bigger than dragons that eat carrion and small animals."

"Sounds peachy." He grumbled. "Under normal circumstances, I'd never complain about the opportunity to shoot stuff, but… this is an exception."

The trees around this fringe section of the swamps were thinly spaced. Though vines still twisted like fingers above their heads in the dark, earthen peninsulas leveled the surrounding landscape like walls of towers and clouds of torchbugs lit up the darkest recesses and groves.

The cave was tall enough for another of the human to stand atop his shoulders, and it was fanged with hanging creepers and stalactites, giving it the appearance of a creature's maw in the dark. Crickets started to overwhelm the caws of crows and the croaks of toads. The cave was luckily not very deep, and so worries about potential guests arriving from the recesses were cut off at the head. A bed of mushrooms bigger than him clouded up the very rear of the cave, their caps glowing shades of luminescent, spotty azure.

Spyra curled up regally among some rocks, sighing as she stretched her cat-like limbs and flexed her orange wings.

"Can't expect a dragon to go without pampering." She grinned at him. "I'm still feelin' a little peeved about that ravine thing..."

So he spent a good while gathering wood that hadn't been wetted by all the peat ponds dotting the area (which was a whole other kind of battle) and returned with them in a pile. When he went to leave to find a flint, Spyra held up a talon and pinched the bridge of her snout, appearing suddenly to be in distress.

"What?" He asked, pausing in the mouth of the cave. "What's wrong with your face?"

"…._Ah…. AH-ACHOOO~!_" Spyra sneezed, and a ball of fire whipped across the ground and smacked into the timber pile. It went up like he had coated it in gasoline and flickered proudly, illuminating the interior of the cave amber. "_Ack~! _'Scuse me."

"Someone did that on purpose."

Spyra wiped her nose and stuck her tongue out at him, laughing girlishly when he blinked at it.

"So you've seen… other people like me, right?" She asked later on, chewing on some raspberries that he had gathered from a bush on one of the hill copses. Raspberries and cranberries were in abundance this far on the fringes of the swamp. They tended to grow at the feet of willow trees and in areas with ample shade at night and sunlight during the day. "Other dragons?"

He paused for a long while, his jaw working quietly on the fistful of berries he'd popped in his mouth. After swallowing, he coughed, mulling over his response as he sat cross-legged on the dirt floor on the opposite side of their fire.

"…Sort of?" He shrugged.

"What does that mean?"

"_Yes,_ I have, I'm just trying to minimize how broad this all must be to you. We have a term called _culture shock._ It happens when people are brought from one kind of reality, or world, or place into another that's radically different." He explained. "The difference in technology, or appearances, is too much for some people. Things can go ugly real quick if the transition isn't moderated, and slow."

"Well, what, man, you afraid my head's gonna' pop or something?" She giggled. "I'm a _dragon,_ I can deal with anything."

"Even dragons have limits." He smiled, shaking his head. He honestly found her… _cute,_ at least, when she wasn't paying him back rightly for kicking her off a ravine.

"Tell me more about this place you come from." Spyra stuffed more berries in her face, chewing with her muzzle open as she pointed for the empty handgun lying by his side. "And what's _that?_"

"A gun." He looked at it sheepishly. "It fires projectiles called bullets at targets. They're pretty common on a lot of worlds, especially the one where I came from."

"And where did you come from?"

"I… I don't really know." He admitted uncomfortably. "I know where I was before I was on the pod, but, where I was born? I've never known that. I've never wanted to. It couldn't have been so well if I can't remember it."

"Gee', been in that boat, man." Spyra nodded sagely as she gorged herself on the berries, staining her muzzle, cheeks and paws red with the juice. She didn't seem to mind though. "I never knew who made me, or if they were the ones who sent me down that stupid river. I guess they had to have. Who else would've gone through all that effort for an egg that wasn't theirs anyhow?"

"Your adoptive family." He pointed out.

Spyra swallowed a berry wrong, coughing, and punching her breast until it went down. She belched so loud that it rang around the whole cave, making him snicker.

"You're like a tomboy." He chuckled.

"That's what they always say." Spyra rolled her eyes, licking her fangs and talons clean. "My dad's a hard ass, and my mom's a bit of a stoner. I love 'em both, but, being away from home has always been my kind of hobby. Being with them is just… too stuffy. I love my brother too. He's at least fun to hang out with _sometimes,_ even if he's a total pussy."

"You should be thankful you have a family to begin with." He said.

"You really don't? _Nobody?_"

"Some people." He stared into the fire quietly. "Nobody by blood though, no. But some people that I probably won't ever get to see again."

He noticed her looking at him for details eagerly.

"No." He shook his head. "I will not be talking about _that._"

"M'kay, guy, _jeez,_ don't get all defensive." She held up her paws and wiggled them at him, stuffing another wad of berries in her mouth. She chewed wetly as she spoke. "_Buh yu ave tu undehsah my cooreosed. I meah, yu _di_ almose it me wi a faalhn rok._"

"I was in a… a _temple._ It was a warrior's temple, really far away from most folk." He waved a hand dismissively, even though her eyes widened with pure intrigue. "I was training under a very bright man, and a very bright woman. It was a community based on martial principle and nature."

"So you're a _warrior._" Spyra leaned closer, placing her head in her paws, her purple eyes stuck on him like glue. "_Wow~…_"

"Not… exactly?" He scratched the back of his head. "It's a little more complicated than that. But that's where I was before all of this. I was training to better myself."

"Who was training you? Was it a _dragon?_"

"_No,_ no," He laughed. "his name was _Nasu R'ha._ He was… extraordinary. He still is. They didn't take him too, they only took me, because they _always_ take me."

"Who's _they?_"

"Everybody." He threw a stick in the fire and sulked a little bit, his mood diminished. "I have people that I need to save, and evil, _evil_ assholes that I need to stop. But now I'm here, with you."

"Lucky guy." She smirked, throwing a berry at him that bounced off his shoulder with a wet plop. She rolled onto her back, bringing another dripping paw-full of raspberries to her belly to cradle them and munch leisurely. "At least you know how to keep a 'ness happy when you're put to work. Better than dragonflies ever could do, I'll tell ya'. You pick loads of food, you kick ass and you got the talk."

"I've got the talk." He parroted, blinking. "Huh."

"_Huh,_ yeah man." Spyra grinned, exposing all the ruined raspberries clinging in between her fangs. "I never thought I'd ever get a reason to run away from home. Looks like I found him."

"And what about when I reach Warfang?" He asked. "What are you going to do if I go off and leave you behind? What will you do then, I wonder? So far from home, and that family that obviously cares about you?"

"I can find my way back." She shrugged. "I've been navigating the swamps my whole life. I can navigate an ocean."

He guffawed and sat back, marveling at the ignorance of this purple beastess. Granted, she was _brave,_ braver than most. But she was foolhardy, and all that would wind up doing was getting her and possibly him killed.

For all the benefits Spyra entailed with her presence there was plenty she needed to learn. Teamwork, ironically, was one of them. He could smell it on her, that hubris.

_Smell._

His nostrils flared and he coughed. There was that perfumy smell again. It was inside the cave and it drew his attention. Blinking his eyes in what appeared to be fatigue, he glared when his nose pointed him in the correct direction for the smell's origin point.

_Spyra._

The purple dragoness was humming as she crammed the majority of the raspberries he had spent over an hour picking into her mouth. She saw him staring and started, causing some of the berries to roll out of her paws and down her golden stomach.

"Aw, hell no, dude, don't go pulling that shit that you did to Cynder on me!" She whined worriedly.

"Sorry." He cleared his throat, looking away and into the crackling fire. "…What do you know about _Cynder?_"

"Nothin' much." She growled, collecting her fallen berries. "'Cept that she's a murderous bitch who was blowing up caves and talking about my village."

"Blowing up caves?"

"Mana Crystals. Her and the monkeys were blasting them out of the ground to collect them." She rolled a wrist. "I've never really interacted with the things beforehand, but they're pretty common underground around here, and sometimes above ground. They're green and they glow in the dark. The dragonflies think they're toxic, but the Apes were touching them all over just fine."

"Are they magic?" He asked.

"Sure looks like they are." Spyra said. "Her and this _Dark Army _want them for… whatever reasons."

"Weapons." He told her. "Anybody like that, that's picking up lots of magical items is weaponizing them. Is Warfang fighting anyone?"

"I guess them?" Spyra shrugged her wings. "I dunno', man, the north is just a big old mystery to me and the dragonflies. We know there's a war of some kind, and that the Dragon Realms are being attacked by somebody. But until today, I had no idea who. I guess it's a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys who all smell like my great grandmother's ass."

"Being led by Cynder." He murmured. "Or someone above her. I get the feeling it's the latter."

"Not like it matters anyhow," She smirked. "-I mean, we've got _you. _Cynder, or some other crazy maniac, you'll rip their balls off and make 'em eat them."

"I'll certainly try, if I have to." He yawned.

* * *

{🐉}


	11. Chapter 10 - Inner Fire

**Dragon(s)layer**

**10**

* * *

**Inner Fire**

* * *

It took him a few minutes to realize that it was all a dream. A byproduct of everything he'd seen meant that even the lowest forms of mental imagery came out in frightening detail. Things minute to many were stark for him.

Many a soul had quoted that as elegantly powerful. He even remembered somebody very important saying that it was _beautiful:_ the gift of picturesque foresight.

He didn't really know what to say about it, most of the time, anyway. Before the portals, he'd been a more talkative fellow. Cold, hard and painful dosages of reality (or at least _other_ realities) had branded in him a taste for silence and observation. The end result, when you threw a talker into an emo-branded depression chipper was, well, _him._ A strange hybrid of the two, prone to changes in attitude on the drop of a hat.

_Speaking of hats…._

His dream-self reached up and patted around the empty space on the top of his head. The dream may have been taking place _before_ his astrally linking object had been born, but that didn't mean he did not miss its reassuring presence.

Of course, it was normally on top of a helmet.

But that was beside the point.

Normally, missing his hat was something he'd deem a nightmare. Nothing _too_ dark had happened yet for him to label it that. His mind could treat him to some dark shit, and frequently did in his bids to catch desperately sought sleep. Right now it was being appreciable. _Merciful,_ dare he say. But not too subtle.

Nasu R'ha wouldn't be caught dead trying to instill in him such things so delicate as _feelings._ When a saurian tried to break open your head to expose all of your weaknesses, pleasantries usually weren't the highlight of your relationship with them.

So, hearing his old _sensei _refer to him as a _son_ almost made him choke on his tea.

His _dream-tea,_ anyway.

"You have been gone so long, that I began to fear I would never lay eyes on you again, my son."

Dream-Nasu didn't even blink when his student sputtered mid-sip of his dream-cup and spattered dream-tea all over his dream-robes. He just kept this icy and… frankly creepy expression of joy woven on his cloven face.

Maybe it was the mandibles. Who the hell knew? When your mouth looked like a vagina, it was as if nature had designed you to never to be able to grin like he currently was.

Nobody ever said evolution wasn't a complete bitch. _Especially_ him. For all the respect real-life-Nasu had garnered with him, he would never lie and say that the saurian wasn't uglier than an elderly lady in lingerie.

At least the creepy expression and the whole _son_ thing let him know it was all in his head sooner.

"Nasu would never say that." The warrior wiped his lips and scowled over his now half-empty cup. Even if the tea wasn't real, he'd be damned if he wasn't going to enjoy its crisp, minty taste. Just like how they made it in real life… He sipped his meager fluid left and spoke again. "Actually, I don't think there's anybody alive in anywhere I've been that would ever refer to me as something like a son."

"You do not really believe that." Dream-Nasu chortled, his elderly mouth-pieces quivering as he lifted his own spot of mint-tea and took a ginger sip. "I am as I appear to be. I am your _sensei,_ Fallen. I am the one who pulled you out of the ash and taught you what it means to shed your own blood for a purpose. Are you not relieved to see me? After your ordeal, I felt that _any_ familiar face would put you at ease."

"I was trying to forget what the other worlds were calling me." The human grumbled.

"_Fallen._" Nasu chimed. "There are some things I am bound to _never_ let you forget."

The Fallen harrumphed and edged his lower lip, digesting what had been said as he looked down at the dream-tea stains on his robes. He sipped again and smacked his chops, giving a relieved- _'Ahhhhh….'_ –to let the minty after-taste on his breath linger.

"You're full of shit, bitch." He chirped after a full and healthy pause.

"...You really are not any fun." The imposter sighed, still using his old master's elderly, edged voice. The mighty, seven-foot-tall alien placed his now empty cup between his folded legs and reclined on the prayer matt beneath his knees. "Should I just drop the guise?"

"Yes. _ButImean-_ …before you do, just a little creative advice?"

"_Oh, _certainly. I shall lend you my _ear_." The alien leaned forward and cupped a four-fingered claw over the little hearing-hole capping the flank on the side of his neck. No ear to speak of. The ruse was in the shit now, if it wasn't before.

"You need to make it more convincing." The Fallen rolled his hand in the air, seated across from him on his own prayer mat in the stone, cold and quiet chamber. "This is why we were never good at being con-artists. You lack the emptiness of apathy. You need to be cored on the inside, able to fit a new sleeve at a moment's notice, if you really want to trick people. The key to deceit is improvisation."

"Spoken like a true master." The imposter chuckled, rolling its mandibles. "…So can I take it off now?"

"Take it off." The Fallen waved fingers at him. "Who wants to have a-"

"_-face that looks like a blooming cunt anyhow, eh? Eh?_" They both said in unison, lifting their eyebrows too in exact duplication, just to make the point.

"No, seriously. Get it off yourself. It doesn't suit me." The Fallen glowered.

"You mean it doesn't suit _me._"

"It doesn't suit _us._ Just take it the hell off and get on with whatever you feel the need to say."

There was a flash of light, and where dream-Nasu had been seated a second ago, was now another pink-skinned, hairless ape just like himself.

Another Fallen. Two Fallens in the same space. Fallen One nodded at Fallen Two with a slight grin, and Two (he was the subconscious, the _inner-voice, _remember that) picked his cup back up and sipped it again, this time with lips, and not freaky alien mouth-parts.

"Conscience." The Fallen nodded.

"Greetings from your mind!" Conscience saluted. "Alright, after quick pleasantries, and a little sight-seeing." He gestured around the meditation chamber, exactly like how they both remembered it being before they had left.

Prayer mats, little incense sticks jutting out of copper bowls. A hole in the roof with streaming moonlight coming through and dappling off the gloriously depicted and sculpted alien statue taking up the northern wing of the room. The alien warrior was eternally caught in a battle poise, double-pronged blade raised above his saurian head, mandibles splayed in lust for blood.

"I think it's a little off. Nasu kept the place in better condition, and I've been away from the incense for so long that I can't remember how it smells." The Fallen snorted, noting the baseless odor in the air. "But none of that's important anymore, I guess."

"Are you ready to start talking about what I brought you down here for?" Conscience smiled, looking hopeful. The Fallen abhorred his own facial features for a second and sighed, sipping on the last of his tea.

"Yeah, just keep your pants on." He chided. "Seeing Nasu is always a pleasure. I suppose even old farts have their methods of making their way into your heart."

"_Fart-heart._" Conscience snickered childishly, playing with his fingers in the air. "What good fun! This world that we're in right now is chock full of stuff like that, _fun stuff._ Anywhere that has monkeys with bomb authorizations must be a trip!"

"I'm not like that."

"You never let it out, boy!"

"I don't want to. Just one last thing and we'll get on with the therapy session. You have Nasu, you have the room, do you…" The Fallen trailed. Conscience smiled sadly and held a hand aloft, beckoning him.

"I won't stop you from asking." He sympathetically said.

"…Do you have a picture of _her?_" The Fallen asked.

"We swore an oath not to see her until we _saw_ her. You know that, I know that, _we_ know that."

"That's all we do is show up, screw up the order of things, and make empty promises." He swirled a few drops of residue in his little cup, staring down at it with indecision. "It's the Grand Quest, I know, but it is… pretty soul-sapping."

"Something you're gonna' have to get by if you want to survive in this new and dangerous world, my friend. You fell out of the sky, you've lost your gear, your weapons, your _bitches,_ but none of it permanently!" Conscience wagged a finger, smiling devilishly. "Certainly not the _hat_ either, _wink-wink, nudge-nudge, sir._"

"Don't do that." The Fallen winced.

"Right! Therapy time! Doctor is in the house and is taking orders."

The meditation chamber vanished and was replaced in a flash of white with a small oak-walled office. An abacus ticked on a cherry wood desk, and now Conscience was regally dressed into a tuxedo, complete with a black bowtie. He sat in a lavish, freakishly plush red chair and extended white-gloved hands in invitation. The Fallen blinked and looked down at where he was sitting, or, rather lying. A patient's futon. How quaint.

But, uhm…

"-the fuck is with the penguin suit?" He pointed accusingly.

"Don't doctors need to keep up appearances for their patients?" Conscience sounded like he was advertising a sale's pitch. When his patient simply drummed his fingers on his belly and stared at him blankly, he conceded with a bow of his head. "_Fine fine,_ next time no tux'. But I'm keeping it for now."

"Whatever."

"Tell me all your problems." Conscience whipped out a notepad and started scribbling with a little pencil.

"I'm trapped in a place I know was meant to bait me." The Fallen explained, leaning back into the futon and staring at the ceiling. He just noticed the fine oak paneling. His mind could really go the full mile for details, he'd give it that. No blurriness, dream-like surreality or anything to boot.

Fuck, he was a scary human being.

If he could even be called that anymore.

"_Ah!_ So the issue involves Little Fallen." Conscience pointed erroneously at his groin. "This is good, it's good progress, really."

"It's the smell."

"That smelly-smell?"

"It's the smell that we know is coming off of… of…" He trailed, and looked over at the desk, jumping when he saw Conscience had discarded the notebook and was hunched over the desk's top menacingly, drool dripping from his tongue-slathered lips. "…_Uhm…_ Are you-?"

"_Say her name._" Conscience blabbered hungrily, like he was starving, and his patient was about to bring out a fresh steak dinner. "_Say it you fool! Say it!_"

"But I-"

"_SAY IT~!_"

"…Spyra."

Conscience rattled the whole office with an orgasmic cry as he deflated on top of the desk, a pool gathering underneath his cheek and chin.

"…_That's the girl…~_" He moaned, fingers clawing and scraping across the desktop with effort. "_The Dragon-Pussy! The Grand Quest! YESSSS~!_"

"….Uh, yeah." The Fallen weakly pumped a fist in the air, grimacing at all the saliva. "Woo-hoo?"

"Yes of course, boy! We knew our enemies would utilize our ultimate weakness against us at somepoint." Conscience snapped back to attention, all the drool, discombobulation and whatnot having vanished. He was scribbling on that notebook again. "They did the same thing with that Nordic child! …_Oh, _what was his name… Brain-Fart? Burp? Chester-the-Molester? _Oh! _Wasn't it Martha? Something with an 'M' I think. But it was his steedette we porked into the sunset that I'm speaking of."

"Not even close." The Fallen pinched his nose-bridge. "But yes, that was where it all started-"

"The addiction, you mean?"

"….Yes."

"Right right right…" Conscience was scribbling furiously. "So how do you plan on tackling the problem? Abstinence?"

"Fuck no." The Fallen scoffed.

"Excellent! Any other answer is worth a death penalty for one such as yourself. Though I must inquire, the _containment units._ Aren't they your key?"

"They're part of it." He settled into the futon, doting on his own bare feet past the robes. "One of them has our weapons, one our suit, one our blade of righteousness. One has the key out of this world. We combine all that, we get back to our friends, we get back to our place. We can keep going from there."

"With all the possibilities for conquest, poon and gold rife for the taking!" Conscience smacked a finishing dot on his notes and looked up from the pad with intrigue. "…Wait a second, I know that concentrative look…"

"I'm not making a look."

"Holy crap, you're reluctant to leave aren't you?!"

"Think about where I am," The Fallen held his arms open. "a place where no judgments from the past exist. A fresh start. A new world. A clean _slate._ Villains to defeat, lands to explore…"

"I hope you're not talking about that fine piece of Goth-ass that we got to eye-up at the river corpse." Conscience pointed with a pencil.

"Cynder's with Spyra."

"_Delectable~!_"

"Yes, I am a little reluctant to leave. Realistically; isn't _that_ the original purpose of our Grand Quest? Were we not supposed to bridge the gap between the worlds, seek out our glory and make everyone fear us, love us, hate us, everything in between?"

Conscience looked bored all of a sudden.

"You want my professional advice? Learn to just say you came out here to get a pussy in every color of the rainbow." He stood up from his plush chair and rounded the desk towards the futon. "I _am_ a doctor, you know, finely dressed and aware of all your needs!"

"That was part of it." The Fallen slurped up his own lips and twiddled his thumbs like an asshole as his subconscious got closer. "I haven't even gotten out of these shroom-swamps yet, and look how deep I am, Conscience. The pheromones are already getting to work. Now we _know_ it works between realm barriers, and it'll follow me with every one I meet! We've just… you know, gotten into this whole business of jumping, and I have the beginnings of something concrete, something immaculate, and… and really _big_. …Why are you looking at me like that for?"

Conscience sat on the edge of the futon with a stupid grin on his face.

"You sound like such a nervous little virgin." He chirped.

"…You can burn in the worst kind of hell and I will smile."

"Your problems run deep! But, I have the solution," He held up his notepad with a giddy expression on his face. The Fallen leaned forwards and quirked a brow, narrowing his eyes when the prior started to snicker loudly. "…yeah? Yeah? _YEAH?!_"

"Yeah." He nodded, appreciating the crudely drawn stick figure of what was clearly another firearm piece, but this was one alight with all kinds of scribbles denoting electrical currents. A badly lined beam shot forth and connected with a similarly badly-lined stick figure. A stick figure with a dragon's head. Sporting two, large, ovaloid masses on its upper torso and another two on its lower rear section.

"And of course, don't forget the guns meant to kill people too, don't get me wrong." Conscience threw the pad over his shoulder and held up his palms defensively as he rose from the futon. "But as is, take the recent loss as an opportunity of _chance._ The Grand Quest never tires, and that durg-puss be fresh, sir. Did you see the innocence glinting in that baby-girl's magenta eyes?"

He leant down and cupped a hand over the Fallen's ear.

"_Draconic virginity, man!_" He hoarsely whispered. They both shuddered. "It's all part of the plan! Yep! Yep. Yeah… just, you'll also have to go through a little native quest while you're at it. All realms have their own problems."

"But where do I start?" The Fallen asked. "Spyra's unwilling to go back to her village, this city, this _Warfang_ is across an ocean to the north! None of the other pods have come down, and now an army's after us."

"Well, what if we put all of that in a better light, stick a bow on top and call it pretty?"

"_wat?_"

"Start small!" Conscience extended his arms overhead in a complete contrast, like he was gesturing to a giant light-up sign. "Search the local area! It may be a shit-hole, but even swamps have secrets! How about the _river,_ the one that Spyra's egg ran down all those years ago? Someone at the head of that river, had to put her there! Someone _possibly…_ loyal to Warfang. _Ah? Ah?_"

"That's one goal."

"Tell me another, brave one!"

"The Forbidden Funguswood." The Fallen snapped his fingers. "Wherever these Apes and Cynder are based. Hit something at the heart and kill everything around it in one precision strike, like we did to the San-"

"_Quiet now. Quiet._ You have to wake up now, I'm sorry." Conscience shook his head, and the office started to fade into a black miasma, a soup, from which it would not return for a good while. "But I think this was a wonderfully productive session. We should set a follow-up appointment. How about, on a This-World's-Fate-for-You-Day at, oh, say… _twelve-o-clock…?_"

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}**_

* * *

His eyes snapped open immediately, reigniting his senses, and making him feel the warm, scaly, and soft body entangled with his.

The Fallen snapped down to look at himself as he lay on the cave floor. A pair of wide, draconic, purple eyes rose up to meet him.

"…_Uhm…_" The warrior faintly uttered, watching with shock as all color drained from the reptile's face, making her look albino. "…did I miss something?"

"_Goodmorning-~!_" Spyra shrieked. Her claws clapped over her snout and she jolted.

She was lying in a sprawl all over him, seated atop his pelvis, spooning the human for all he was worth.

_Though, technically, isn't it a little more than spooning if she's on top of you? _He wondered, not at all minding, given what his dreams had just revolved around.

When Spyra didn't say anything- but also didn't move –he made her start when a large grin erupted across his face.

"So," He chuckled, placing his hands on her thick hips. "how are ya', girlie?"

**_Fwooooffff~!_**

Spyra's wings had preened, like an airbag erupting from a steering wheel. She was sporting such a hot blush that literal soot was wafting through her nostrils and into the air over their heads.

The dragon sputtered something unintelligible, suspiciously sounding like- '_Mhmha-HA-Cupcakes-~!_' –before leaping back off him like a cat.

"_Nothingthatjusthappenediswhatitlookslikeitis-_" Spyra pointed a talon at him and gulped. The human laughed and started to stand up.

"Looked like someone was getting frisky to me." He teased.

"Shut up, dude! Just- just shut up…" Spyra simmered, mimicking the stereotype of a pouting girl as she fell on her haunches and crossed her paws, doing her best to focus her attention on the cave wall nearby instead of him. The blush had turned hot red now and was invading her entire face. "…It was cold last night, and… and you're really… y'know, _warm_ and shit…"

"'Course. Maintaining your own body-heat's essential I guess, to surviving." He sniggered, and winked, which she saw out the corner of her eye. He didn't think it was possible for her to burn up even more, but _viola, _surprises every friggin' day, right? "What time is it? We should move."

"E-Early morning." Spyra coughed, watching him as he moved to the mouth of the cave, wincing whilst reams of bright blue light flooded in from outside. "The weather cleared up a bit. Serves us right, we deserve some sunshine after yesterday, _A.K.A,_ the worst day to ever happen."

"I don't like your optimism." He muttered jokingly, stepping out onto the dirtway outside the mouth to look around the surrounding swamps. "Beautiful day."

"I just said that." Spyra plopped herself beside him and yawned, stretching her wings and her tail and flinching when the tip of one of the prior touched his arm. She looked away again and squished her cheeks with her paws, trying to hide the still present flush. "-_S-So what's the plan for today, sky-man?_"

"I actually have one, believe it or not." He sighed, hands to hips as he surveyed the horizon. The smoke was gone from the crash sites. He could still see them though, through all the shrooms and the trees, they'd made big enough clearings to present them as holes, wantonly wanting from a distance. "You remember that river you told me about?"

"Which river? Yesterday was a blur, dude, I can barely remember my own name, let alone anything I blabb-" Spyra jolted, and paused. "…you don't mean _my_ river, do you?"

"We're going to it." He told her, walking back towards the cave. "I'll collect some food we can use as rations. We're staying low and moving in the shade. Get ready, 'cause I'm leaving with or without you in ten minutes."

"But there isn't any freakin' reason to go there! I thought we were going to Warfang? Why are you going to my basket-river? _Hey~! _Don't you walk your sorry ass away from me, come back here and answer me!" Spyra lunged and hugged his ankle. He grunted and dragged her belly on the stone floor for two tugging steps before she growled and held him in place. "I'm a _dragon!_ I have the strength to part the oceans and smash boulders, damn it! I said for you to answer me, and fuck, _you're answering me~!_"

He looked down at her and squinted.

"Besides, not telling me is just rude." She fluttered her eyelids at him, smiling cheaply. "And you wouldn't wanna' say no to a lady, would you? If yes, then you're a dick."

"I've told off more ladies than you think." He raised a brow. "Think about it; someone put you on that current. Dragons only live in the North, right? Why would someone _not_ from the North, have your egg? And try to save it?"

He could practically see the gears turning. Spyra scrunched her snout and hummed.

"…Someone _from_ Warfang." He said.

"_Oh….OH! _Oh, wait, shit…." Spyra let go of him and stood up. "-That means, if we find something, my destiny has literally just been an evening stroll's distance from my home this whole time."

"Could be." He shrugged, gathering up their little campsite with a few bends and swipes. "Who said anything about destiny though?"

"W-What else would you call all this?" The dragoness pointed a wing tip at the sky, as if the script awaited him in the clouds. "It literally came from the heavens!"

* * *

{🐉}

He stuck to his ten-minute warning. In that time, he took stock and saddled up for their move. Some of the rubbery material from his jumpsuit torn off the arms made excellent tie-up sacks for fistfuls of raspberries. Spyra found a cranberry bush not too far from the cave mouth, and so they at least had some variety with their singular rations. The empty pistol was a downer. Of course, the pod he had looted had not been stuffed with spare magazines, and after that fight in the river corpse, the gun was dry.

Though, he supposed bashing an Ape over the head with it as a blunt object couldn't hurt. Plus, if more of the pods came down, there was no telling what sorts of ammunition would be siphoned from the rather disastrous trip that had brought him here. More rounds for the sidearm was likely. He shoved it on the little strap hem of the jumpsuit, along with their food and the stolen Ape-crafted blade, his only true weapon.

It was right as he was stepping into the clearing outside the cave that Spyra ran up to him and said-

"If we're gonna' do this, you need to teach me how to fight."

The human stopped mid-walk and glared at her. For a moment, only the drone of day-active swamp fauna in the backdrop marked a disturbance. Spyra smiled as wide as her snout would allow her to.

"_Pwease'?_" She gave him puppy-dog-eyes.

"You already know how to fight." He reminded. "The river corpse? You tackled curvy, emo and bladed without any help from me."

"-And you took out, what, like a _bajillion guys_ all on your own. _Unarmed_ for a minute, too. You have shit going on, dude, and I want in." Spyra blinked and mumbled in additive- "_-and she wasn't _that_ curvy…_"

"_Ugh, _we need to-" He gestured ahead, and then sighed. "…Alright, what is it you want to know?"

Evidently, that meant a spar.

The whole thing was working up to a spar. How did they have time for this? Hell if he knew, but the feisty, purple dragoness was dead-set on it, probably because she still wasn't satisfied with her nut-crunching revenge for his kick-maneuver that he had pulled on her yesterday.

He didn't think spite could run so deeply, long and subtly in such a creature.

But then again, she _was_ a dragon.

Must have had something to do with the unnaturally long lifespans or some shit. Not that he had the patience to find out.

"We can fight here." Spyra swept her nose in appraisement over a mushroom copse off the clearing. There was a pit, reachable by winding footpaths lined with large mushrooms and creepers. Enough of the shrooms as large as trees held overhead that their crimson undersides cast reams of dappling, bloody hues into the pit below, where sunlight penetrated the caps.

"I thought we were _sparring._" The human grumbled, looking down at a disturbance by his foot. A millipede with large, yellow eyes and cute, tiny mandibles was crawling up his leg. Problem was, the millipede was at least a foot long. The insect had eyelids. It looked up at him and blinked with a tiny chitter. He grimaced and kicked it off, seeing it to roll away with a minute squeak.

"What's the difference? It's beating the daylights out of someone on an official listing. It's a fight, but, ya' know, one with regulations. No killing and all that." She was still looking around the pit, only now gazing up at him. "What's that look for?"

"Sorry, the stank of bullshit is rife." He rolled his eyes.

"What's wrong with what I said?"

"Fighting is different from _sparring._ Sparring sticks to a regimen of a certain style in repeated procession. It's like boxing, but it might not necessarily be that exactly. A _fight_ is something you wage against your enemies. A spar is between two opponents mutually seeking improvement in each other's technique." He quoted his _sensei_ for once. He didn't do that enough, but the dream last night had been enough of an incentive.

_Among other things…_ His eyes strayed down her curvy, feral back. _Waitaminute. No. Focus._

"You sound like a boring old school teacher with a tumor in his hip and thin blood pressure." She arched a scaly brow. "You forget your walking stick in the cave, gramps?"

"Stow it, you flying newt or it's gonna' turn into a fight." He chuckled, grabbing and shoving her horn playfully as he stepped past her and hopped down into the pit. "Keep it clean, and I'll humor you. But _only for a round._ Time is wasting and we gotta' move soon." He called back, pausing in the center of the makeshift ring. He grinned and asked: "-How about a grappling match? First one to wrestle the other to the dirt wins the day."

Spyra's eyes lit up at his behavior.

"Bring it." She smiled, opening her wings and gliding down into the pit. "You sure we can't go for best two out of three?"

"No." He shook his head, reaching down to his hip and casting aside the blade and the food pouches there. He cracked his knuckles and spread his arms wide.

Spyra hummed approvingly and started to pace around him in a slight, quadruped jog, her chin bashfully lowered, and her eyes only glazing over him once in a while with a lidded heaviness.

_C'mon, monkey boy, gimme' an opening…_

"You _do_ know your shit." She purred, finishing a full circuit around him. The human adjusted to keep facing her the whole ring, grinning at the tension. "So, you were trained and stuff, right? You had a… a… whatjyu' call him?"

"_Sensei._ Yes, awhile ago." He nodded, still keeping up his spread stance on the move. "He didn't teach me how to fight, he taught me how to refine the energy I _use_ to fight. All crafts need a directive, and he helped me find mine."

_Can't let him draw me in. Focus, Spyra! You've wrestled every bug, scav' and critter in this swamp. You can take a spindly sky-man like him…_

"Where'd you pick up your moves before the old guy polished 'em off?" She stopped half-way through her next jog-ring and started stretching in front of him, locking her front paws and lithely spreading her torso out behind her. The bent-over position did work to distract him. "_Hey,_ alien-boi', my hips don't have eyes."

"Yet they're so fine to stare at." He winked.

_W-Waitasec-! Oh-! OhFUCKMYLIFE-BLUSH-_

Spyra chirped like a bird and clapped her paws over her cheeks.

He bounced off his heels like he had been standing on a springboard. Spyra didn't even have the chance to blink before the human was sailing right into her.

Sucking in her breath, the dragoness slipped like liquid from his arms, and he found himself hugging air. Grunting, he dug a heel into the dirt and swiveled west, arms open as a purple mass bounded once, twice, off the side of a mushroom, and hurtled at him from the flank like a missile.

_Jesus Christ she's fast!_

Spyra slammed into his ribs and took him down to the ground. The human and the dragoness rolled to and fro, arms interlocking, fingers meeting talons, palms to paws in a bid to hook and wrap one another.

Every time he reached forth to ensnare her, she countered with a swipe of her claw. His legs went for her hips? Nonsense! Hers were much wider _and_ armored. She broke the lock and instead trapped his waist in the grove of her lower half.

Being a dragon had its benefits. She was able to twist and bend in ways human anatomy was never meant to. A fine cloud of dust swirled from the pit's interior as the fight went on. A small band of millipedes had gathered at the top rim of the pit. One of them was squeaking, its front leg-nubs clasped around a leaf that others were tossing pebbles, bits of shells and exoskeletal shavings in for decent bets.

"-_I guess I should be impressed or something-_" Spyra smiled through grit fangs, flipping him onto his back and hooking his legs with her thighs. One paw pinned his wrists to his throat, the other had gripped a wad of his dark hair and yanked his head back painfully, jutting his chin up at the mushrooms overlooking the pit. "_-You're no drake, and look at how long it's takin' me to win. You crashing into my life may just be the best thing that's happened to this 'ness yet, ape-boi'._"

She leaned in close and bumped him on the cheek with her snout.

"-_Beg-_" She said.

"-_WHAT-?!_" He choked.

"-_Beg, hu-man. Tell me to end it-_" She grinned daggers, adventure and something else lurking behind her purple irises.

"-_You sound like Cynder-_" He gagged, wriggling like a tortured worm.

"_-Oh, I bet you'd like that wouldn't you?_-"

Did he detect a scowl?

Now they both were smiling. The warrior bent forwards as best he could, meeting her eye-to-eye with the most unnerving grin he could muster.

"-_Y-You bet I would. Having all those soft, black curves up against me. Cold steel that could slice through rock just inches away from me? Talk about hot-_" Spyra's brow twitched and her grip faltered. He ripped a wrist free and grabbed her by the horn, earning a suspiciously toned, loud moan as he yanked her reptilian head up and away from him. "-_I normally don't go for the girls out there to kill me, 'specially after we just met, but you have to admit; that bitch is sexy enough that I'd be willing to let it slide-_"

"What does _she_ have anyway?" Spyra spat, he tore another wrist free and curled around her shoulders, but she didn't even notice. "She's not even that pretty looking! She's-"

Her world spun and she ate the dirt. Spyra puffed in pain as her neck and breast were compressed to the ground. He yanked her arm behind her and gave it a slight curl. A knee to the small of her back planted her.

"-_She's_ the perfect ruse." He finished for her. Up above, the millipedes erupted into a miniature ruckus as betting scraps flew everywhere. One of them became so enraged at his apparent loss that he tackled the leaf-holder. "And she's also a perfect example of why you should never let an opponent distract you. You want me to train you? First critical feedback; you monologued yesterday and it almost got you killed."

"_OooooOOOoooyou, you're just a dirty, dirty little cheater-_" She hissed into the soil.

"If playing on weakness is cheating, then arrest me on the spot." He grunted, lifting his knee from her and releasing her arm. "The first rule to fighting is that _there are no rules._ You want an advantage over the people trying to kill you? Play dirty. Play as dirty as you can."

"-_Sure thing~!_" The dragoness wormed and spun underneath him. He lost his balance and fell. Spyra wrapped his pelvis in her legs, straddled him, pinned his wrists again and kept him there with her weight in the blink of an eye. He was hogtied. The dust was still settling when she leaned close. "-I'll keep it in mind, tough-guy. _Play dirty._ You found the right swamp 'ness for that, I'll tell ya'. And hey, I thought this was a _spar_, sens-eye, not a fight."

"It's _sensei,_ you uncultured pleb." He growled. "If I say you won, will you let me go so we can get on with today?"

"_Mmhmm, yeah~._" She cutely nodded her snout, resting her chin on his chest to dote on him with her puppy-eyes again. "Then you gotta' tell me I'm prettier than that mushroom-squatting whore."

When he remained silent, she tightened her grip, making him grunt.

"Hit me, human boi'." She licked her chops. "_And a one, two, three, go~._"

"You win." He grit his teeth, swallowed, and got out: "-and you're prettier."

"_Oh?_ Of whom do you speak of? I need to know _who_ I'm prettier than." Spyra giggled, squeezing him, eliciting a pained bark. "Humans really are brittle when you get past the defenses. I bet I could shatter this bone right here if I sneezed and clenched by accident!"

"…you're prettier than Cynder. Now let me get up."

"_Nu-uh,_ you gotta' say it my way."

"For god's sake, what the fuck is wrong with you, woman?"

"_Say it._"

"_OUCH~! Fine! _Fine, just…" He composed himself. "-You're prettier than that mushroom-squatting whore."

"And I have fuller hips, like, totally, yeah?"

"_Well-_"

"_Say it~!_"

"-_OW~! Ouch! Alright! You have fuller hips. You're curvier! You're thick as fuck! You're bodacious, and you have wicked breeding hips!_"

Spyra made that chirping noise again. Up went those paws to her cheeks. He kicked her off in a heap and leapt to his feet, rubbing his wrists tenderly.

"…*_huff* -_This isn't a _spar_ anymore, and we're out of time. Get up, and let's get moving before somebody really gets hurt." He snapped, bending down to pick up his belongings. "Did you hear me?"

"I heard everything, dude." Spyra was sprawled on the ground, drunkenly staring at something only she could see through the mushroom caps above. Her eyes were locked on the small sliver of blue sky birthed between them all. She thought for a minute, and he huffed impatiently.

"Spyra." He grunted.

"You came from the sky." She pointed up. He followed her direction, and then looked back down at her. "From up there, see?"

"…Did you hit your head on the way down?"

"Fuck you, man, I'm just thinking." She crossed her paws over her tummy and tapped a talon.

"Well, when you're done _thinking,_ get yourself out of the pit, and let's move." The human turned around and hopped up one of the winding pathways, scattering the crowd of millipedes that all crawled and rolled away back towards the woods-line atop the pit's walls.

"You know what I'm gonna' call you?" Spyra shouted when he gained some distance.

_No, don't say it..._

"I'm gonna' call you _the Fallen._ Has a nice ring to it."

He shut his eyes.

"…Of course it does." He muttered, staring at the sky hatefully, knowing all too well of the presence out there no doubt mocking him coldly at this very second.

It was as the dream had gone. All worlds had their stories. That didn't mean he couldn't change this one. Certainly, that didn't mean he couldn't change Spyra.

The notepad was in his thoughts as he stepped away, and, despite being tackled and hogtied like a bitch, a pleasant grin found its way on his face in the coming minutes.

Change was a'comin.

* * *

{🐉}


	12. Chapter 11 - Dreams and Nightmares

**Dragon(s)layer**

**11**

* * *

**Dreams and Nightmares**

* * *

_**{Skyrim OST: Discover High Hrothgar 01}**_

* * *

"I'm not the only one who thinks this is a problem, right?" Spyra hunkered as low as she could to the discus cap of the mushroom tree, peaking over its center brim.

"No, you are not." The Fallen grumbled. "They found the pods."

The sweeping view of the swamp was centered on a clearing just a few swathes ahead of them. A small legion's worth of Apes trundled down a natural footpath, and in their midst squeaked a bulbous, ruggedly constructed two-wheeler cart of driftwood and planks. The team of Giant Anteaters tugging it along huffed and mewled as Ape handlers whipped them and shouted out threats in their brutish tongue.

The cart's shield-like wheels were bladed with scrap to try and deal with the swamp muck. The weight from the sheening, lead-colored sphere tied down in the bed was too much, and several times, the cart jolted as it got caught in potholes and land swells.

Not too far behind, a smaller cart bulged with the second pod that had come down. Spyra noticed that the auxiliary containment unit was smaller than the one the Fallen had arrived in. Now, in broad daylight and without all the smog, she could see the devices for what they really looked like.

Smooth, elegantly sloping eggs of chrome lead. Very obviously not of this world.

A warhorn drawled out, met with the acknowledging hoots and roars of hundreds of Apes.

"Aw jeez'," Spyra nudged him and pointed with her tail down to one of the paths. "look at that one."

An Ape with plated scrap armor and chainmail skirts stood three times taller than his subordinates, a constant sneer written on his baboon-like snout as he toted a hefty double-handed axe and a carry pouch stuffed to the brim with sticks of dynamite.

"Looks like this Chieftain isn't the only big guy on the block." Spyra swallowed, eyes wide as the lieutenant lord trundled down the path with his battalion. "How many of these monkeys are there?"

"Probably thousands." He took a guess, shimmying back on his elbows as he slid down the mushroom cap. "You're certain we can get around them?"

"There's a trench just over that rise. It's a little boggy, but we can follow it down to a grove."

Spyra had already explained it to him. That grove linked to an estuary curve that was birthed from the river. One of the reasons the swamps were so prevalent here was because canal systems branched like fingers all throughout the landscape, effectively rendering it into a gigantic mud-sponge of sorts.

They had to sneak through clusters of man-sized shrooms and bushes, skirting up a hill that ran parallel to one of the paths being used by Cynder's Ape Army.

Just below them, legions of hundreds of Apes traveled north in disorganized phalanxes and mobs. The high-shouldered, hunched beasts resembled moving formations of dirty, furry foothills.

The Fallen accidentally stepped on a twig, and the report was so sharp that it echoed. Before Spyra could react, he'd swept up from behind her, and pinned the two of them behind a tree, a hand over her snout.

Some whoops of interest took a while to die off as a dismissive officer swept in and punched a few subordinates on the side of the road. The massive racket prevented the majority of the horde from even noticing. Those that did acted accordingly; _it was nothing but animals._

The echoing cry of Cynder herself sounded occasionally to haunt them in the shade of the woods. Even the Fallen found himself constantly gazing upwards at the clouds, rueing the possibility of seeing a blur of black.

The fell dragoness was certainly quick on the wing. Whenever Cynder passed close to them she was gone in the blink of an eye, a black dart from west to east or likewise and nothing else.

Hours passed of trudging through that swamp. He was thankful the jumpsuit had boots for his tired feet, and Spyra had grown used to it for so long that her talons didn't matter.

It all culminated at the grove.

"…so if your opinion on gods is so low, why does it sound like they have so much influence over you?"

"Influence doesn't mean I'm allowing it to happen. And they're not gods. Don't misinterpret power for something so omnipresent." The Fallen shook his head. "When you get around, you tend to make a lot of important people angry. The problem is, the rest of the world has an issue with powerful people being scumbags on top of it."

"Nobody likes a hero." Spyra hummed, looking up at him and winking. "I understand. Back at my village, nobody ever really accepted my views on things. Everyone's so terrified of leaving tradition and shit. My question is; _why?_ Why are people so afraid of living their lives the way they want to see them lived?"

"People ground themselves by nature." The Fallen regarded. "So much blood one bleeds comes from self inflicted wounds."

"…Okay, philosopher. Sure, I get that." Spyra laughed, considering him with a surprised grin as they walked. "Whose words were those?"

"Mine."

"_Oh._"

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon OST: Small Valley}**_

* * *

Up a swell of cragged earth, past the bushels of a cluster of luminescent blue mushroom caps, the man and dragon reached a precipice with tired huffs from their long trek. They stood over a panorama of unsurpassed beauty for such a place.

The grove was populated by miniature forests of blue mushrooms growing along its black shores. The land barred it in across a wide, almost bowl-like valley, whose cliff faces were obscured with veins of greenery, shroom cloisters and black, finger-like creepers flowing down as an unmoving fall from the feet of massive willow trees.

All the glowing fungus made the water appear ghostly, and sunlight dappling off it produced a disco-ball effect of wavering water veins across the cliffs boxing the little grove in. A few birds squawked shrilly overhead and fluttered between the immense caps shielding the natural little treasure from the sky above. Even over the distant sound of warhorns, the sight was breathtaking.

"You didn't tell me it'd look like this." The Fallen muttered after a long moment of silence between the two. His gaze fell on the purple dragoness beside him.

"Figured it'd be a bit of a surprise." Spyra shrugged her wings, grinning. "-And I thought someone so thoroughly seen across entire worlds wouldn't bat an eye to something the _natives_ treasured."

He knew she was joking, but he spoke deeply anyhow.

"Of course I would."

Down a hillside slope, the two passed through a clearing muddled with the occasional cluster before skimming the shores of the waters itself. This alley was so hidden away in the boggy maze that was the swamp that neither of them were worried at all about Cynder and her lackeys finding them here.

"_Look!_" Spyra stood on her hinds and gripped his side, her eyes locked on something across the eastern shore of the grove. "Mana Crystals…"

Some rock blades had been hiding them. But truthfully, there they were. Bundles of luminescent, emerald crystals as tall as the Fallen, and in some cases taller. There were three individual clusters, winking in the aqua shade as if they beckoned to any who dared witness them.

The Fallen took a second to dart his eyes between them and her as she continued to lean on him. Spyra was fixated on the crystals.

"I'm just letting you know," He said. "if your little mosquito people turn out to be right, it's you who's taking the punishment."

"My people are under-educated peasants." Spyra retorted with a chuckle, hopping down and trotting off their course. "They've been surviving through fearing what they don't get long before I came here. Are you comin', alien man?"

"Pick out _surviving_ in that sentence." He rebuked, forming to a light jog to catch up to her.

"I told you before, I saw Apes touching them just fine." Spyra reached a few feet from the furthest cluster, so close now that the green glow cast her face and breast in a sickly neon hue. "…._Wow._"

"Wow indeed." He drew to her side and cocked his head. The crystals pulsed occasionally and gave off a tiny, near incandescent ring on the air that was just in the backs of their hearing.

"They're beautiful." Spyra breathed, taking a paw-step closer.

**_Whmmm~_**

-They both flinched when the gem faintly changed color. It flickered _white_ at her proximity.

"It likes you." He sniggered. "You still want to touch it?"

"I never said I wanted to touch it!" Spyra shrilly defended, hopping back, looking between him and the gems quickly. She hesitated, fiddling with her tail in a paw.

He inclined his head and creased his lip at her.

_Really?_

"…Okay, maybe… maybe just a talon's tap." Spyra licked her muzzle. "I mean really, what could happen? The freakin' _monkeys_ walked away without a scratch, and they can't even handle rocks without hurting themselves. There's just… there's something inside of me, I don't know how to explain, it's just begging me, no, it's _commanding _me to touch those Mana Crystals."

"You never touched them before, so why the sudden interest?"

"I dunno', it feels like spontaneity is the new key to everything. I've never touched a Mana Crystal before, yeah, but I also never believed my first friend would fall out of the sky before yesterday." Spyra appeared sheepish, and she reached over and punched him in the arm. "…N-Not that I mean, to, ya' know, sound all cheesy and shit. You're still an asshole and all that."

"I've been called worse." He chuckled. "What about your brother? I thought you said you and he were on good terms."

"Siblings aren't your _friends._" The dragoness stared at the gems, suddenly appearing thoughtful in the neon green haze. She took a step forward again, this time, not flinching when another white pulse strained the crystalline spires. "They're… they're something else. Something closer, but… but _always there._ Having siblings doesn't fix the isolation, I guess. It's like having a hole in your spirit, and trying to fill it with _other_ parts of your same spirit. Does that make sense?"

"I think so." He glanced back the way they had come.

Was it just him, or did the warhorns sound closer?

"Spyra?"

"It's amazing those fleabags didn't find them up here. They've been scouring the whole northern side of the swamps for two days now." Spyra could breathe, and her breath bounced off the side of the spire closest to her. Her paw was off the ground and hovering tentatively over the surface. She was shivering. "…D-Did you say something?"

"We need to keep moving." The warrior held out a hand, but retracted it after a moment. "…Hey,"

Spyra tore her eyes from the gem, meeting his gaze.

"Touch it." He told her.

The dragon thought about it, and then she snickered.

_Damn guttermind._

Clicking his tongue, the Fallen crossed the distance, reached forward and grabbed her wrist before pressing her palm to the stone.

A blinding, green light overtook them both. The air rushed and a howl of unnatural energy wailed across the waters of the grove.

The Fallen shielded his eyes and lost his grip on her, stepping back from pylons of blinding green and white. The rush was indescribable.

What had he done?

"-_Spyra!_" He called. The hurricane of energy would not cease. Wisps of tendrils that were translucent, and feathered to the touch danced in the air in covetous rings around him. One of them- like an ethereal, flying SeaMonkey –whisked straight into him, breaking against his chest like cool snow.

The Fallen forced himself to pinch open an eye, and found that the haze was no longer stealing his sight. He sat in awe at the display across his tattered jumpsuit's breast, and he brought his fingers slowly through the neon mist.

_Vines,_ was his first thought. Dancing vines born onto the air. _No, not vines. _Magic.

"Spyra?" He looked up.

The purple dragon was standing on her rear legs, paws outstretched on either side of her, wings preened to reveal their full, orange majesty, even as emerald illumination bathed her beautiful body.

The cluster she had touched looked different. He realized it was smaller. Half the spires had vanished into thin air. Spyra's mouth was open, but no sound emerged. Her eyes glowed entirely green, and the inside of her mouth pulsed it too.

The light flickered to nothing and died. The aqua shade of the grove flooded back in like water breaching an unseen dam.

Spyra gasped like it was the first breath she'd ever taken, and collapsed onto her side in a heap. He rushed forwards and rolled her onto her back.

"Are you okay?" He asked stupidly, eyes wild as he scanned her golden belly for wounds, gripped her snout and sought for pain in her expression. He was left wanting, in both regards. But that noise… "Are you…?"

Spyra's eyes had appeared heavenly in their closed state, like her lids were pillows, showing her a vibrant dream. Now, as she opened them, he witnessed the widest grin he'd ever seen her make. She held his wrists and started to laugh.

The Fallen blew a breath of relief through his lips and sat back, blinking at her in a mixture of astonishment, and a little bit of annoyance.

"You scared the piss out of me." He grumbled, folding his head in his hands.

"_Out of you? That was the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced~!_" She cackled hysterically, rolling to her haunches, bawling laughter straight from the diaphragm. "_-I-I almost shit myself~ ha-haaaaa~!_"

"Then why are you laughi-"

The Fallen scrambled backward when Spyra's wings flapped, and she shot up into the air like a bullet!

"-_Wooooooooo~!_" She sang, spinning in an arrow's rotation as she nosed for the heavens. She craned her neck back and stretched in the air, reveling in the amazing rush that flooded her system.

She felt like her blood was gold.

Spyra opened her mouth, reared back, and released a cyclone of elemental might.

**_Fwhh-shhhhhhhhh~! _**–broiling tongues of the sun filled the air over the grove in a firestorm. The blast of flames was so brilliant that it illuminated the entire trench, forcing away the blue of the fungus, turning the water itself copper.

The Fallen wobbled to his legs and held a hand in front of his face, feeling the washing, oppressive heat even from where he was.

One thought coursed through his head:

_Hot._

Damned guttermind. At least nobody here was innocent.

Spyra howled and spread her wings wide, flapping them once as she sailed in a circuit around the grove water. She drifted, gliding down with her legs draping from her, still laughing wonderfully even as she touched down right in front of him.

"What was _that?_" He asked.

"_That. That was…~_" Spyra stood on her hinds and clutched her chest. "…That was the best feeling I've ever experienced in my entire life."

"Sounds a little dramatic." He tried, stepping closer to her and taking her shoulders. She giggled, and in that moment, leaned forwards, nuzzling her snout into the crook of his neck. He froze up as the dragoness embraced him in the wake of her rise. "…So, this is… awkward to ask now, but are you okay?"

"_I'm okay._" Spyra sighed happily, closing her eyes to just focus on every sensation she felt. The rush of the magic, the flames, the _power,_ the warmth of the Fallen's skin. Spyra slapped her chops, and her wings preened behind her. "…You're the best good luck charm."

"But I didn't do anything." The warrior chortled, placing a hand on the center of her back between the wing joints.

"I'm here because of you." Spyra leaned back and doted on his chest, flames trickling out the corners of her mouth. "…I wouldn't have touched that crystal if you hadn't made me. I-I was about to back away. I was about to reconsider…"

"Wait a minute," The Fallen grinned. "Spyra? _Afraid?_ Especially of a rock? I find that troubling to swallow."

She clicked her tongue and shoved him by the face away from her, earning a laugh.

"You're welcome!" He staggered back.

"Good luck charm," She shot back with a smile. "-but still an asshole."

* * *

{🐉}

The grove tapered into a brook at the end. They followed on the thin shores of this and passed down a winding estuary run of shallow water. Sunlight did not struggle here. They had a clean vein of blue, cloudy sky cleaved in the canopy right above the estuary. They hiked rock formations beneath the star's heated gaze.

At least, _he_ hiked, and risked twisting an ankle. Spyra hopped like a sugar glider from rock to rock, babbling incessantly about the crystals back at the grove.

"It was like, someone bundled up all the elemental energy in the world and used me as a filter for it." She said. "It was like I was born for the first time, seeing and really understanding what it means to be a dragon."

She landed unsteadily on a rock, her paws scrabbling for a second as she paused, and a look of shock passed over her.

"…All this time, m-my breath. It's been so fickle. Fire's a pain in the ass for me to breathe! I always had to wait so long for it to come back even after just a little spitting to get a campfire going! But now-" She opened her mouth, and the air crackled and roared as a pylon fifteen feet in length shot out from her throat and sizzled to nothingness on black reams of soot. "-_look at that! _I'm Jane-Fuckin'-Pyrotechnics!"

"Some things just take a little _push._" He shrugged as he walked past her, talking over the little babble of the canal. "I wouldn't think too harshly of yourself about it."

"_Oh my god._" She gasped, hopping onto another rock beside him to stop him with her tail and gawk. "_This means I have no idea what it's like to be a dragon!_"

"That's ridiculous." He craned a brow. "How could you not understand being_ what _you are? I get _who_ but not _what,_ that's just…"

"You don't get it, Fallen." Spyra shook her head, purple eyes wide like platters. "I don't mean like my body, and my limbs and… and stuff like that. I mean _spiritually._"

"You?" He said, brushing her tail off his chest. "Cowed by spirituality?"

"W-What's that thing called? A _transforming experience._" Spyra hopped after him closely. "My eyes were opened, dude! You can't make fun of me _now!_"

"I'm not judging, I'm just waiting for the high to wear off so I get my usual, smart-ass dragon back. Not this Disciple Gone Awry who can't get over her first trip on _crystal_ dope."

"Your smart-ass dragon never left, you monkey." She laughed. "But she just found something that really… really puts things into perspective."

She grinned and shot another torrent of fire, watching it dance and die over the water. She looked at him.

"Spyra _likey~._"

* * *

{🐉}

Cynder was actually considering shoving the brooch up her nose by this point.

She'd been pacing around with the necklace smashed into her snout for so long, that all she could smell was mint. Mint leaves and the piss-stale essence of her own fury.

Oh, and it didn't help that the mushrooms were still growing in a literal _forest_ right outside her fucking tower.

Her dilapidated, rat's ass, ruined, Northern-constructed, handmedown bat's lair of a tower. Her pile of rubble that her master had deemed to be hers.

How _thoughtful._

"Please, Mistress! Movement only hinders your reparative work, yes yes." Gigaw cried hoarsely, leaping and flailing his little arms as he struggled to keep pace with her. "Damage wrought to Mistress' impeccable form is offense untold! Yes yes yes… One in need of atonement."

"What do you think I've been pondering all night, you little green scab?" Cynder snapped.

The doors to the observatory's upper level swung open with a pair of hollow booms, startling the pair of Cold Legionnaires. Cynder gasped, spun in a leap, and faced the cracked arch with wide, hopeful eyes.

"Mistress-" The largest of the Apes fell to his knees.

"_Well~?_" She shrieked, her voice echoing all around the Forbidden Funguswood.

The Ape officer slowly raised his head from the floor. He shook it in a motion so slight, that many would've missed it.

Cynder screamed and brought a fist down into the tiles.

**_Blk~! _**–pebbles flew as a new spider-crack was wrought into the ancient stonework.

"Reorganize the ranks." The dragoness howled, utter rage working itself through her features as she barely restrained herself from tearing into her own soldiers. "Merge your forces with the Chieftain and march _south._ Spread out, and demonstrate to me some measure of worth that will preserve your little life. _Go!_"

The officer probably got a bruise when he hit his face into the floor, little simian coos of terror mewling out through his teeth. Him and his terrified gang scrambled back out the doors and down the chute stairs.

Cynder stared daggers at the empty doorway, quivering as bouts of fury slithered through her guts and inflamed her heart.

"…Mistress?" Gigaw meekly raised a gnarly finger.

"_What._" Cynder's voice sounded like a pair of rocks grinding together.

"You bleed still." The Grublin pointed at her breast.

Cynder looked down, taking a second to observe what was happening, and met it with a feral growl. A drop of blood was heard pattering off the tile in the silence that followed.

"It appears I do." She cleared her throat and reclined into her usual pose of regality. A paw opened and red energies swirled around her talons again. She did not wince as the scales surrounding the blade-impalement on her breast reknitted themselves, following strings of rekindling flesh beneath. "Such doctoring, at least, hasn't escaped my ability to reconcile, unlike so much _else._"

Cynder rolled her eyes and huffed, steam wafting from her snout as she sat on the floor, her tail curling feline-like around her cuffed ankles.

"If Mistress would be open to outside aid…" Gigaw wattled to stand before her, bowing his hideous head. "Might Gigaw suggest a more direct route?"

"Oh, this should be nectarous." Cynder hummed. "What feeble little scheme have you hatched in that mind of yours this time, Orderly?"

"Forgive Gigaw's overeagerness in suggesting, Mistress; but perhaps it is time to seek guidance from _Her_ before She seeks _you._"

Cynder's partial amusement died and she stared coldly at the Grublin.

Midday like this, the sun could touch the highest points of the Funguswood. Her tower breached the landscape thoroughly, and so the normally gloomy atmosphere of the observatory was awash in daytime shade.

Still, none of that dampened the effect of the black dragon's cruel gaze. Gigaw shuddered and puss leaked more fervently from his mouth holes. Age had never saved him from the bleakest terror. Cynder's Siren Call could antagonize the bravest of the living. It was said by some that Cynder could even instill fear in those who were already dead.

The Iron Corpses in the Arctic Frosts could probably voice ascension of those facts.

But Gigaw would have had to be suicidal to try and dig up tales like that. Some knowledge was even too forbidden for _him._

"I would be a fool to think you'd ever reveal any personal treachery or goals of your own, even under _my_ attentions of interrogation." Cynder listed flatly. "Should I just assume that your politicking skill has revealed an ample chance for a power grab?"

Gigaw almost wanted to cackle in her face and scream at her for allowing her paranoia to make her sound so vulnerable. But, as she said, his _'Politicking Skills' _advised him to keep quiet and treasure that little nugget of info.

The longer he stayed with her, the more of her weaknesses he uncovered.

The Dark Army could not be maintained without an extensive web of inner deceit, information gathering and threatened chance of betrayal, after all. Evil was only so brittle.

"Mistress misunderstands Gigaw's intents!" The Grublin bowed repeatedly. "Such poison-fruits might be _blunted_ if Mistress is proactive and meets the Dark One's displeasure with honest regret. Yes yes yes…"

"Hmph." Cynder snorted. "Beg for forgiveness from a slight not yet reported?"

"Gigaw risks much with what Gigaw now says," And Gigaw even took a deep, raggedy breath before he said it. "but Mistress will be held responsible for _losing_ the purple dragon in the Southern Swamps, regardless of circumstances."

Cynder wriggled her talons as the last of her wound finished sealing itself. She looked down at her wrist cuffs and thought about it.

Who was she to lie to herself and say the green little bastard wasn't correct?

Spyra the Purple Dragoness was now on the loose, as prophecies had foretold since immemorial. Cynder had her own dark libraries gifted to her by Malefora. She knew the annals just as well as any elder of the North.

"Ah, my Mistress. Humble blessings upon you, as always."

Both Gigaw and Cynder looked up as Tinker, the Ape mechanic, stepped through the arch, and bowed lowly, before adjusting his monocle, and speaking again.

"Forgive my intrusion, my Dark Lady, but I am pleased to inform you of th-"

"Where were you taught the art of speaking? Tell me _that._ So that I may find the birthers of such prolonged, grotesque adultery and burn them alive." Cynder scowled, rumbling the whole observatory as she fell to her belly, and scowled like an angry cat on the floor, her chin over her paws, her expression glum. "Just spit it out, Mechanic."

"…_Ahem, _Right-O." Tinker hid his offense and straightened up. "Our extraction of the fallen metal objects from the skies was a success. Both of them lye in wait for your examinations in the lower battlements, as requested."

At least _something_ had been done right.

Cynder hummed and waved a paw at the arch. Tinker bowed again and backed out, vanishing down the chute.

"Mistress is certain of what she saw?" Gigaw asked. "A being of hairlessness? A _simian?_"

"This creature, this _Fallen,_ refers to himself as _human._" Cynder corrected as she sprawled on the tiles. A shudder wracked her form, and she quietly forced down a need to whine. She clenched her thighs together, eyes angrily daggering at the archway. "His abilities are… _formidable._" She swallowed.

"If Mistress still feels pain from wounds, Gigaw will enchant ancient, ancient rites gifted by the Dark One to aid Mistress in-"

"Keep your hands away from me, Orderly. Nobody alive possesses the right to touch me, _nobody._" Cynder spat, rising tiredly to begin trekking to the observatory's patio plat behind her. "Your earlier advice has appeased me. I will consider it. Now get out, I wish to have my own thoughts."

"Yes, Mistress." Gigaw bowed and scurried out the doors, which slammed shut behind him.

* * *

_**{Halo Wars OST: Flollo}**_

* * *

The observatory was hers again.

Cynder stepped to the railing of the platform, craning her larger, mutated frame up to rest her forepaws on the top beam. She sighed, and placed a palm over her snout's ridge, letting her wings preen and catch the wind lowly whistling this high up. The sun beat down on her, making her look like a dark gash in the otherwise bright ambiance. The steel decorating her body flashed white, and the ceremonial runes kissing her scales glowed silver.

_All is washed away by the sands of time,_ she thought, wincing as another uncomfortable pain stabbed her lower half.

Now that she had a second after all the chaos that had happened to think, she considered her position.

She still didn't know what the Fallen had done to her. Some kind of magical attack had been continuously impacting her ever since their encounter at the river corpse.

The quote earlier had come out of a scroll she'd read one time, one of the many records kept by the cursed dragons that lived under the volcano as Malefora's population of followers.

_Night Dragons._

Cynder loathed them. She hated them and yet wished to be one of them.

Before she had become the Cloud Ripper, and the Terror of the Skies in the North, she had been regaled by the ranks of the Dark Army as her master's halfbreed experiment. A corrupted hatchling of Northern birth raised as a superweapon to finally break the New Kingdom.

A _tool._ One that would've worked or broke.

She smiled at how that had all played out. Being warlord had its benefits. The purges she'd been able to undertake had been most delicious during their conceptions.

But none of that had anything to do with _now._

Now, the possibility of failure loomed over her head after she had already attained her title. The purple dragon was supposed to be a savior. Even if she wasn't as powerful as the stories told, she was still a symbol that could restore the morale of the Northern armies. Wars were in part won by those inspired the greatest.

Cynder let her paw fall from her face, and she stared bleakly down at the plateaus and Funguswood far below, seeking… _something_ in all the bulbous caps and hills. Anything really. Just to instill a curiosity that took away how angry she was.

"_Ach~._" She shut her mouth almost as soon as the sound came out.

What kind of magic was this?

Who cast spells that created a… a _libido?_

Cynder hissed like a crocodile and rubbed her legs together. Her life had been consumed with war, and titles, and power, and the amassing of influence. But Malefora's corrupting energies hadn't entirely erased her organic functions.

Cynder could still feel emotions. _Annoyance_ and _elation_ being the most common. She still craved fine food, coveted rare and delicate perfumes and incenses, she pondered over the finest tapestries and textiles and had a creative drive towards ink upon paper. A writer. A passion her occupation had continuously stolen from her.

But aside from that, there was also… well, _being female._

She had cravings of that nature too. The problem was the availability of suitable partners. There, she was left wanting.

She remembered one time, years ago, during a battle, a certain drake she'd encountered on the opposing side. He had been an officer, leading a Wing against her armies. She never learned his name. He was sleeved in a coat of reflective blue scales, with a silver underbelly. Black horns, black talons, eyes more golden than polished coins.

He had met her in an aerial duel over the battlefield, locking claws and teeth with her, entangling tails, batting with wings; everything to combine together to make a glorious death-lock between two _dragon-kin_ trying to kill each other.

The muscles he had sported, the lithe gracefulness. Cynder recalled a tiny yanking sensation she had experienced upon first laying eyes upon him. A little stab of fervent attraction that she had held onto, even as he tried to rip out her throat. Her body grinding against the unmistakeable mass of masculinity harboring in his limbs. The crackle of his fiery breath. The _power_ he gripped her tightly with…

Cynder shook her head, blinking rapidly.

All of that was irrelevant anyhow. She'd disemboweled that officer and left him to die in the dirt in a puddle of his own entrails.

Who was to say she would not do the same to the Fallen?

…._The Fallen?_

Nobody had spoken, and yet Cynder was reacting to something with horror.

That tug in her chest, that feeling of butterflies nesting in her stomach, that tingling, spicy heat building up in her hips…

Cynder laughed sourly and stepped away from the railing.

"Holy shit." She sniggered in torment. "I'm losing my mind."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Skyrim OST: Dread 04}_**

* * *

Listening to her Orderly was a quick way to sober up. Contacting her Mistress was key to maintaining good standing with her.

The only way to do that was to go beneath the catacombs of the Forlorn Watch, where the Portal Pool was kept.

Slaves clicked away at rock and earth in alleys and alcoves, overseen by Ape sentries wielding whips and daggers. Underneath rags, their emaciated, furry bodies gave off a bodily odor that saw Cynder nursing the brooch during her whole walk.

_Moles. Filthy rodents._

The Moles that noticed her presence cowered in her shadow. Many fell to their knees. A few started to cry, mainly females and younglings. The Ape overseers bowed and hooted and whooped out of respect. Cynder ignored all of them and pressed deeper into the winding, ruined tunnels.

_Down to the black heart._

Maybe once, the Pool had been used to talk to elders and guardians holed up in Warfang itself.

Now, it had been corrupted to serve as a conduit between the Dark Army's various strongholds throughout the realms.

The bowl-like Pool was chest-height on her- about four feet tall –it was made of ancient, bricked stonework in mimicry to the rest of the Northern designed tower. Its interior sloshed and bubbled with a black tar that swirled endlessly in its center.

Cynder craned her neck over the tar and stared into its murk for a moment, sighing.

_Proper incantations that could kill, a liquid so toxic that it could dissolve metal. There are scholars who died thinking all these things were merely nightmares and phantasms._

Cynder looked around the otherwise empty, ovaloid chamber. Then she looked back inside the Pool. The tar blubbered and popped like a stew.

_I hope she isn't in too foul a mood as I am._

She stepped back, folded her wings, and cleared her throat as the words returned to her.

"_Sly'ath mehcahn ath u ulurr._" She uttered serpentinely, and puckered the tip of her muzzle, as if she was making to blow a kiss.

_Fwhmp~_

She spit a neon pink ember from her lips. It sailed like a drop of water, and landed in the center of the tar.

The liquid ignited, and the whole room glowed as a billowing, pink-colored bonfire roared out of the Pool's neck. A giant brazier filled with...

_Convexity._

Cynder waited for the fire to dim. The flames stopped licking for the ceiling, and in their diminishing, revealed a floating aura of pink dust dancing above the Pool.

The air wavered, and a voice traveled out from the bubble. It was deep, gravelly, unmistakably female.

"…**_Cynder~_**_._" It chimed, surprise and satisfaction lacing its echoing tone. "**_To what do I owe this unexpected calling? I wasn't anticipating so early a conquest's success. But that isn't what this is about, isn't it?_**"

"Regrettably, _no._" Cynder smiled, keeping her chin high as she talked to the pink bubble of dust. "My Mistress."

"**_Formalities feel so trivial between us, hatchling. A woman can't harbor anything but a matriarch's poise to someone whose eggshell was held in their palm, fresh from birth._**" Malefora sounded dreamy, and the air was pregnant with a most unneeded pause.

Was she being serious right now? And just how much more awkward was this going to become?

"**_It has been a long age._**" Malefora must've seen the look blooming on Cynder's face, and sighed. "**_How are you, hatchling?_**"

"I've… faired better." Cynder admitted with a slight bow of her chin. "My Mistress, something has happened."

"**_You've finally encountered the Purple Dragon of the South._**" Malefora clarified loftily. "**_Don't look so surprised, I am as much a part of the world as I am its enemy. I felt her emergence as soon as you did. So don't worry, I've already taken my frustrations out on others less useful than you._**"

Cynder swallowed.

"T-That is _also_ regrettable."

"**_The Orderly has reported to me nothing but fine tidings of your progress bleeding the south dry. Shipments of the crystals have been supplying our ranks fruitfully. What we lost in the Twilight Forests? It's piecemeal compared to this. The Cheetahs can keep it._**"

"If you are aware of the purple dragoness, Mistress, you must be aware of the _Fallen._"

"**_That's what you're calling him?_**" Malefora paused again. "**_…Fitting._**"

"I seek your guidance." Cynder humbly lowered herself to the floor. "I have lost the first battle, but I shall atone. With your patronage at my wings, I can-"

"**_Hatchling, I created you to never need my guidance. What am I to you, some kind of a surrogate mother? Tell me I am not._**"

"I… I was not questioning you-"

"**_Tell me I am not._**"

"….Y-You are _not_ my mother, Mistress." Cynder stammered, her lower jaw suddenly quivering as she bowed lower.

"**_Of course I am not. You do not have a mother, Cynder, Black Dragon of the Peak, Lady of the Southern Front. You do not have a mother simply because you are a creature born from my hatred, and my lust for the demise of freedom. You are a cretin. Love recoils from you and nature abhors your birth. Never forget this. Never forget what my _benevolence _gifts you._**"

"…Y-Yes, Mistress…"

"**_Now all the pieces have been revealed. I put you down there, my best general, for more than simply overseeing the largest extraction operation in my empire._**" Malefora explained. "**_I can't think small with hens like you, Cynder. You are too valuable an asset to waste on economics. Your quest is to destroy that Purple Dragoness before she can realize the extent of who she is. Smash the North's little prophecy into bloody ribbons, stall their hope and swallow their lives! Doom this world, and bring the Endtimes._**"

"I shall fly once more to meet them. My army is canvassing the swamp as we speak. I will find the dragon and this Fallen. I shall kill them." Cynder rose, but still was mindful to keep her gaze low. If Malefora was satisfied, it was not voiced. Cynder took the opportunity and opened her snout again. "…M-Mistress…"

"**_…Yes yes, speak your concerns, I sense necessities weren't the only thing on your mind._**" Malefora grunted. "**_Something troubles your thoughts, something non-trivial, thus it earns my eye and ear. Tell me._**"

"The Fallen has afflicted me with… with an enchantment of sorts." Cynder dared a step forwards. "He has done something to me that no amount of dispels, counter castings or manipulations of the elements will rid me of. I do not know what to do."

"….."

"My Mistress?"

"…**_Step closer._**"

Cynder blinked.

"W-What?"

"**_Come to the edge of the Pool, hatchling. I shall not ask again._**" Malefora sounded concentrative now, and the energy in the room clearly spiked in a different angle. Cynder obeyed, even though every nerve-ending in her body screamed at her to stay away from such proximity. Even to creatures of evil, the Dark Mistress' presence was abominable and naturally incorrect.

Cynder stopped with her face just beneath the pink dust bubble, she fiddled with her brooch, quivering as the colossal spike of dread stabbed her in the heart.

"M-Mistress." She stammered, her ear-holes thundering with blood.

_Control yourself. Remain stoic. Breathe. You were born to endure agony. Breathe._

Cynder could feel Malefora leaning through the magical embrace of time. The proverbial inspection chilled her scales and blinded her sight with dragonfear. Cynder's mouth was open, but nothing came out.

She thought of her Siren's Scream.

Was _this_ what her victims felt?

No, this had to be worse.

It _was_ worse.

"…**_This is… something else… this…._**" Malefora's voice was a harsh whisper, and it was right in Cynder's face. "…**_is an abomination!_**"

Cynder understood pain. Pain was nothing to one born from the broken evil of hell itself. But what Malefora did to her over that pool broke her resilience.

For the first time since Cynder had been fresh from her egg, she wailed, like an infant.

"**_This _Fallen, _he insults me~!_**" Malefora ranted, shaking the chamber, shattering the air. "**_Look what he has done to my fervent skill and craftsmanship. He defies my right as goddess! He corrupts my own flesh!"_**

Her Mistress paused as a rage that could crumble the world to dust gripped her.

"**_We need to have a talk, hatchling. A talk about boundaries, and the consequences of crossing them. Let me inside. I'm going to wring your intestines like a goat's teat and banish this poison from you. Hold still._**"

Cynder screamed.

* * *

{🐉}


	13. Chapter 12 - Familiar Roadfriends

**Dragon(s)layer**

**12**

* * *

**Familiar Roadfriends**

* * *

_**{Skyrim OST: Combat #1}**_

* * *

The stick of dynamite bounced off a rock's flat and rebounded right for his face. The Fallen's jaw dropped, and he cursed at the top of his lungs, reaching high, plucking the explosive from the air to juggle it in panic.

_Talk about a hot tomato. Not the first time, at least._

Rolling painfully onto his belly, the dynamite's hissing fuse became distant as his foot caught on a rock, he tripped and hurled it completely by accident across the canal and to the opposite shore.

The Ape officer had just been beating an axe against his roundel shield when his own explosive smacked him upside the head and landed in his lap.

"-_Lookout-~!_" –One of his lieutenants screamed. A spark of light became the beginning of a mushroom cloud. Several bodies tumbled through the air, some still screaming. They landed in the misting rapids and either met their end from the shockwave, the fire, or being beaten to death against the jagged rocks.

_Lucky toss._

The Fallen's smiling was interrupted when the air whistled. He rolled onto his back just as an Ape screamed and swung parallel around a nearby rock.

**_Clink~! _**–the cleaver kicked sparks as it ate into the stone right beside his cheek. He anchored his waist at the tailbone, lashing the simian fighter in the chest and chin with two precise kicks.

A purple blur swept in, and another of the Ape's friends attacking from the flank was lifted clean off his paws. The monkey howled in terror, then Spyra swung around like a top, vaulted her wings and catapulted her victim into the rapids dividing the battlefield.

"- _Fifty points for that throw!_" She whooped, fist-pumping as she glided back over his head. "_I'm already up to six! Top _that_ alien-man._"

The Fallen grinned grimly as he sliced open his victim's throat from jaw hinge to shoulder. The Ape gurgled and fell over a rock, bouncing like a rubber ball down the steep coastal rise before smacking into the misting rapids with a plume of white.

The Fallen glanced up and swore as an entire mob of Apes scampered down the opposite shore, infesting the black rock fields like a swarm of fist-sized insects. His side was already infested with enemies, and the ones on the opposing coast were tossing dynamite into the flurry of melee with no regard for their comrades.

"_Concentrate all yer fire on the hoo-man!_" An officer yelled over the river's roar, swinging his sword for a row of crossbowmen arranging behind him. "_The Mistress wants 'im ded or alive!_"

"Well that's generous of her to specify." He frowned as he decapitated another victim and kicked the corpse low.

"_How come _I'm_ not as important a target?_" Spyra complained, her wings flapping as she glided over and above the shore. "_I think the role of protagonist is a little messed up._"

The Fallen cried out to her as she flew. Spyra was too busy whooping in excitement as she flexed the newfound strength in her wings. Ever since she had touched that Mana Crystal, she had found herself flying faster, harder and higher, with longer glide times.

She puckered her snout and rode a wind current over a cloister of rocks, a stream of flame bathing the handful of Ape soldiers scrambling over it. They screamed and became living torches, flesh melted, eyeballs popped and fur became rubber. Some of them tumbled down into the rapids. Others collapsed on the scorched sand and twitched until they died.

"-_Spyra!_" The Fallen barked, leaping from rock to rock, his blade slashing aside Ape warriors in ones and twos. "_Did you hear me?!_"

"You said something about me being right, right?" Spyra laughed, slashing an Ape's face open as she swept by. She lowered her head and presented the bronze tips of her horns, grunting when they penetrated something squishy, and fur pressed into the top of her head.

She meat-hooked the Ape through the abdomen, flapped once, brought him higher up, and spun her body to the right, sending him rolling down the rocks.

"I think I'm gettin' the hang of this." She grinned.

"_I didn't say you were right!_" He ducked as crossbow bolts clattered around the rocks. "_I said _dynamite!_"_

"Dynamite?" Spyra croaked.

Another officer mounted a boulder, heaving back, like he was preparing to throw a baseball, and chucked a freshly steaming stick through the air.

Son of a bitch had waited for a half-fuse before loosing.

Spyra folded her wings and dropped like a rock. The dynamite burst mid-flip and flooded the air over the canal with a flash of flame and soot. Thunder crackled through the blue sky.

"'Scuse me, honey." The Fallen tackled an Ape and wrenched his head in an arm lock, the neckbone snapped like a twig and he shouldered the corpse, picking up the scrappy crossbow he had dropped. "Blasters, shortsights, long scopes and launchers… all that and I cannot for the life of me remember using one of these before."

The Fallen took cover behind a ledge, using his foot to keep the crossbow down as he yanked back a fresh bolt.

**_P-lnkk~! _**–it sounded like a pinball bouncing off a bumper, and the kickback was horrendous.

At least there was some satisfaction when the bolt flicked across the canal and buried itself to the hilt in an Ape's breast. The soldier howled and fell, writhing like a dying insect on the rocks.

"Still got it." He snickered, reloading.

"_Twenty eight!_" Spyra sang, a sphere of flame belching from her mouth with the speed of a bullet. It hit an officer and popped his entire upper torso like a flaming water balloon. The head and arms all went in different directions, and the legs liquidized into the sand, turning to glass. "_Twenty_ nine~!"

_Thirty two,_ the Fallen mentally listed, smirking as he dropped another of the monkeys. The rapids screamed and the swampy mushroom forest loomed over both shores, shroom trees and willows lined together like overeager, starving spectators.

At least that fight turned out to be brief. These Apes were nothing without their larger kin organizing an effective offense.

The key was to kill the officers.

"You're a natural fighter." The Fallen remarked, his brand new crossbow hilted over his shoulder as they hiked. "Why did you think you needed anything from me except some praise?"

Spyra chuckled at him.

"I can smell out someone being too modest." She winked. "When we get to Warfang? You're gonna' show me _everything_ you haven't already."

"I think you're looking too deeply in a simple package." He shook his head.

"We'll see, sky-man, we'll see."

Both he and Spyra lost count of the number of Apes they killed, and eventually, as hours turned into the next day, they stopped avoiding Cynder's Ape patrols and began to slaughter them on contact, building up their skills through each skirmish on how to combat and defeat their new enemy.

The path to follow the estuary run was perilous, however, not just because of the Apes lurking about in heavily armed warbands, though the terrain constantly ensured that battles were always interesting.

The Apes tried all kinds of things to stop the two of them at Cynder's direction. They rained dynamite from positions up high, tried to trap them in ravines and use crossbows, and they blocked tunnels rooting through the limestacks overlooking the canal.

With each defeat, their reputations in Visigoth's tribe only grew.

Until eventually, the Fallen and Spyra became quite used to hearing…

"It's da _hoo-man! _And the purple drag!" An officer howled, kicking a bolted, stockade barricade between himself and the other end of the tunnel. "Bring him down, lads!"

The barricade splintered as Spyra literally went right through it- and by extension, the officer –wreathed in dragonflame that lit up the whole passageway. Ape soldiers screamed and died as the Fallen emerged fresh from the flickering embers, hacking and slashing with practiced ruthlessness.

"Which tunnel leads up?" Spyra groaned, looking between an intersection filled with Ape corpses. What was frustrating was that no matter where they were, they could always hear the rush of the canal. It echoed through the caves and never told distance.

"Maybe I should _ax_ these guys about it, huh?" The Fallen chuckled, rolling an officer's body over and tapping his forehead with his stolen weapon.

"Dude…" Spyra crinkled her snout, giggling at him. "…that stinks worse than all of these monkeys combined."

"At least they were kind enough to bring me a supply dump." He chuckled, relieving the dead of weapons, dynamite bandoliers and the like. "They won't need it where they're going."

More and more often, the swampy terrain began to morph into treacherous, rocky alleys requiring tight navigation around overgrown and mossy stacks.

Platforms of earth suspended from massive willow roots were the only bridges over pits of razor-sharp thorn thickets.

"See? I told ya' it wasn't so dangerous." She'd laugh, wings carrying her effortlessly over the dangerous and very dark trenches.

"_Easy for you to say!_" He'd heave, being forced to climb vine networks or cliff ridges over several story drops. He didn't think his heart could take another episode of his foot slipping like that…

What time wasn't spent hiking or fighting, was taken up by them foraging for food, water and shelter. Spyra knew the swamps so well that pretty much everything they needed she had an answer as to how to get. She'd oftentimes come back with something in her jaws, usually a dead badger, some fish or sticks filled with edible berries. She knew where all the caves and groves were, and where to get firewood. He'd chop and she'd ignite it.

The whole while, Spyra told him about everything she could think of. She told him about Cometcu, and Lightnux and Firefly and a whole plethora of other things, sometimes so quickly that he'd lose track of the subject.

At one point, they had been forced to go up a hillside pathway navigating limestone stacks. They couldn't see the estuary that was their guide, but they could hear it through the top of the cliff trench. It was always a murmuring babble in the backdrop.

Prior ambushes by the Apes had Spyra darting her eyes around with a kind of cautious mania. She examined the mossy, swampy rocks above with malice.

"The dragonflies used to tell spooky stories about the cliffs around here." She muttered over the ambiance of crickets and a whistling breeze. "That the howling noises the wind makes when it flows through the rock stacks are the souls of animals that have died here."

He almost told her that ghosts weren't real.

And maybe for _her_ world that could've been truthful. But past experiences had only reassured him of just how restless the dead could really be.

In the end, he settled with:

"I'm right here for you."

Spyra paused on the path and looked up at him. She smiled, her tail whipping happily.

"…Yeah, you are. Thanks, dude." She chirped.

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro the Movie Soundtrack: Prelude to a Dream}**_

* * *

Eventually, they found an open-faced crevice to camp in that night. It wasn't as enclosed as the caves they normally chose were, but the Fallen had wanted to take it on account of the view.

"What's the suit made out of, anyway?" Spyra pinched some of the linen of the Fallen's reflective jumpsuit as she lay beside him.

"It's made out of a reactive material that has a thin gel layer inside of it. It allows me to operate in any environment by regulating its temperature to match my body heat." He explained, leaning back against a rock.

This alcove was at the summit of a hill, and thus in two spanning directions, an ocean of willow tree canopies rendered blue in the nighttime din extended for miles. Massive mushroom caps were speckled among the trees, their spots glowing purple and pulsing in the dark. The swamps looked like they were glowing.

And that was just on the ground. It was the starry sky above that really got them to give the hill a try.

"Those are the Celestial Moons, my mom, Cometcu, is always talking about how they influence her vine-speaking abilities, depending on their positions in the sky." She pointed with her talon as she snuggled against his flank, the two of them taking a moment to pause by their quietly crackling fire. "You see the smaller, green looking one right there? That's Zella. And the bigger, bluer one there? That's Adrano. One's supposed to have good energy and one bad, or somethin' like that, I can't remember that part."

"That's cool." He was struggling to drink in the massive, spatial view above. Adrano was a glowing, blue sphere taking up a quarter of the sky, its bottom dusted with darkness and its surface riddled with craters. Zella was the green dwarf westward of it, its distance making it seem like it wished to hide among the carpets of glittering stars surrounding both planetoids.

Whether siblings or rivals, the moons were beautiful in the midnight blues and blacks swirling like reams of milk in the atmosphere.

"But I think you're cooler."

Spyra looked up and discovered his eyes locked on her. He was smiling, his normally creamy skin rendered royal blue beneath the glaze of the moons.

"Y'know," Spyra smiled back, kneading her talons softly into the leg sleeve of his suit. "…I've never been this far past my usual routes. I couldn't take anyone with me all of this time, and it made me feel like every extra mile I went was wasted because I couldn't share the experience with anyone. The swamp's too dangerous a place for a dragonfly…"

"Evidently not for a human and a dragon." He chuckled, scratching behind her horn. Spyra cooed and leant into his palm. She was like a cat. "While we're on the subject, let me tell you: I envy you a lot, to have this place all to yourself, free of responsibility."

"I have responsibilities to my family."

"Yes that's true, but I mean responsibilities of _necessity._ You are obligated to no one, you answer to no one, and up until recently, you fled from no one. It was just you and free time in the center of nature. _That_ is freedom."

"You think _that's_ freedom? You travel between whole _worlds._ You can be anyone you want, wherever you want, _however_ you want… _that's_ freedom." Spyra picked at something on his chest, just looking for excuses to put her paws on him when she could. She'd been getting very physical the last few days. "…I think we both envy things about the other."

"That's not important." He hummed.

"It is to me." Her beautiful, purple eyes met his. "-I-I mean… y'know the here and now…"

That night, as she slept on her human under the gaze of the Celestial bodies, Spyra realized something…

The nightmares.

They'd stopped.

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo 2 OST: Peril}**_

* * *

"It's not that big of a deal." She giggled.

The Fallen stared at her.

"It's a big deal." He said, blinking.

"You can pull it off." Spyra nodded past the trim of the ground. "You're an athletic guy. Besides, we can't keep on the route if we don't go _over_ it. We'll be out here for a _week_ trying to go around it."

The Fallen looked at the subject matter.

Plainly: it was a pit.

A pit easily a kilometer wide, filled to the brim with twisting, interlocked thorn-veins. It was a meat grinder down there. Two spanning cliffs sealed the west and east, each overgrown with warped, ancient willow trees, whose deepest roots were the source of the pit's hungering toothed tongues, and whose midsections sported veins so thick, that they had taken earthly platforms out with them upon growth.

Thus, the only way to cross the pit was to hop between suspended, mossy islands, some of which were separated by gaps measuring at _least_ ten to twelve feet.

He couldn't count how many islands there were. Maybe… forty?

This swamp was evil.

"I think I want to go around." He swallowed.

"_Nahhhh,_ c'mon! It'll be fun, and look, I'll even jump _with you,_ I won't fly over it, I promise! _And_ if you fall, I can catch you by the shoulders!" Spyra flexed her paws at him playfully. "I'd carry you, but… you weigh a bit too much for me, for sustained flight anyway."

"Thanks." He rolled his eyes. "I appreciate the reassurance."

"No probs', dude." Spyra whipped him in the ass with her tail. "_Git'._"

Then she flapped her wings and heartstoppingly sailed over the first jump, landing without incident on the first island of the chain.

"_…See…?_" She called over. "_…Easy-peasy!..._"

"Easy-peasy." The Fallen stepped to the edge of the pit, looking down and swallowing. Those thorns were so sharp that their tips glinted sunlight off them.

Holy god….

"_Easy-peasy._" He coughed, winding back for a running jump.

_One… two…_

"-_Aw, c'mon, man….! I'm gonna' grow a beard over here…_"

…_three._

The Fallen sprinted, feeling weightless, he cried out as he jumped and sailed across the gap, making even Spyra cut the chatter and edge forwards in worry.

He landed in a stumble on the edge of the island. He'd made it.

"Nice, frog-man, you can glide good." Spyra nodded. "Just over thirty more to go!"

His triumphant smile was wiped off his face.

"_Fuck!_" He barked at no one in particular. Spyra cackled at him.

Island after island… and the Fallen nearly slipped once or twice on rough landings. His heart felt like it was going to pop, and he was sweating. The thorns down there hungrily glared up at him constantly.

By island number ten, he had to pause to take a breather. Spyra was three islands ahead, apparently enjoying the challenge because of the lack of risk.

God damn her pretty, orange wings.

"…Don't wait for me or anything…" He called out, gripping his knees.

"…_You're almost there…! Just move, dude….._"

"Almost there?!" He cried. "If the other side's France, I'm in Bermuda!"

"…_What did you say…?_"

"Oh just fuck it." He snapped. "I'm coming."

He sprinted and went airborne, legs and arms windmilling until he landed on the next island with a grunt, the drop forcing him to roll to reduce the impact.

"…_What's the matter, Fallen…? Gettin' outpaced by a gurrrllll~….?_" Spyra was _six_ islands ahead.

"You're deriving some kind of sick pleasure from this." He didn't bother trying to call it out. He knew the truth.

Standing up tiredly, he made to start another jump, his eyes flickering briefly across the chasm to the last few islands making the chain to the other side. Spyra's wings flapped as she got closer and closer, island-hopping like a friggin' gazelle.

Where was he? Limping in the back like a wounded cow.

Really funny.

He snorted and took off.

"_…Oh shit- Fallen….! Lookout….!_"

What?

Just as he landed on the next island, he heard an earthy impact, and saw a trail of stones and dust rolling down from the higher cliff face to the west.

He followed the disruption up and felt himself go pale.

It was Cynder! She was perched on a mossy stack like an eagle, glaring down at him with those eerie white eyes.

"Hello again, _Fallen._" She snarled, before turning her nose to Spyra further up ahead. "It looks like I've caught the two of you slacking…"

"No, just me." He sheepishly shrugged. "How's your chest feeling today?"

"_Wonderful._" Cynder licked her teeth. "You and me have much to discuss. But first… let me rid you of your baggage."

The black dragoness made an echoing, great heaving sound, before a torrent of tunneling Wind spewed from the tip of her beak and daggered straight for Spyra.

The purple dragoness gasped and flapped her wings just before the vortex overtook the island she was standing on. Cynder's breath attack was like a translucent limb, hooking around the root holding the island up and shaking it until the island fractured and crumbled into the thorny sea below.

"Why couldn't the one I want _alive_ be the one blessed with flight?" Cynder muttered under her breath, before adjusting her voice so they both could here it again. "Your little domino-bridge will be the end of you."

Spyra skipped islands in her bid to get closer to the Fallen. Cynder shook apart the next one the second she landed, Spyra actually falling a few feet as she took off from the crumbling edge, the land tumbling out from under her feet.

"_Dance,_ Purple Dragoness, _dance!_" Cynder shrieked in joy, knocking down islands like a torturer plucked fingernails.

A crossbow bolt shot out and embedded in her shoulder with an organic _crunch! _–Cynder howled and took flight, sweeping away from her perch to circle the pit.

The Fallen slipped his crossbow back over its belt and leaped another gap.

It was a mini-islet, he nearly teetered off the edge when he landed, his arms swinging out for balance.

"**_Don't fall~!_**"

The Fallen blinked, realizing both Spyra _and_ Cynder had barked out the same thing.

Above, Cynder was snarling. She ripped the bolt in her shoulder out with her teeth and swooped, catching Spyra as she was gliding to another island.

Cynder swatted at her in a near miss, roaring in frustration when the purple dragon ducked and reached the next platform safely.

"Let's see you jump if you can't, _well… SEE._"

Shadow belched from Cynder's mouth on the next pass, completely bathing the island Spyra stood on right as she making to move again. The Fallen heard her cry out, but couldn't see her through a broiling mass of inky flames whipping over and off the edges of the platform like a living fog.

"_Spyra!_" He called. "Hold on!"

"_No,_ Fallen." Cynder was upon him in an instant. "_You_ hold on."

The human cried out as a pair of strong, yet lithe paws clenched over his shoulders and hauled him high into the air.

Was it a bad time to remember heights, without all his proper gear, made him sick?

He was screaming out all kinds of ridiculous-sounding wails as Cynder flew, each pump of her beautiful wings making the pit get smaller and smaller below his dangling feet.

"Fear not, my little morsel~." Cynder salivated as she hummed to him. "I've got you secure, safe and very sound."

"-_Normally-_" The Fallen shrieked, hands locking over her talons. "-_I wouldn't be complaining-! Getting- _AHHhhhhAHAHHHH- _kidnapped by a sexy dragon-!_"

"_Mmmmm, sexy~, _I like that word…" Cynder chortled, her wings flapping as she carried him, the islands sweeping by below. "You have no idea how long it has taken me to find the two of you, constantly circling these fetid marshes like a vulture!"

Cynder made a displeased little sound and flapped harder.

"_Now _I've finally gotten you in my clutches, _Fallen._ Now I get to take you all the way home!"

"-_Home-?! Where's home-?!_"

"_A dark place of misery and woe, where hope dies and malice breeds under the gaze of forgotten towers and the lonely she-witch presiding within._" Cynder dramatically recited how the Northerners described it. "Cankerous Warfangians. _No,_ my human, I'm taking you somewhere, granted, _very_ very dark, but it's dark because it is _private._"

She curled her long neck down and whispered that in his ear. He smelled her minty breath and shivered as she laughed like a spoiled little girl finally getting a long desired treat.

"_Mine mine mine,_ oh! Yes, _mine,_ my human at last…" Cynder sang. "Your touch has invigorated me, even now, your supple hands on my talons… I've never felt something I've wanted to badly. I am going to make you my _pet._ You will pamper me, you will stand beside my throne and appeal to me, _stroke _me, heed my calls for you…"

The Fallen wasn't horrified about the stroking part.

But being a _pet?_

_Him, _a pet?!

No! This would not stand.

"-_I regret to inform you, madame-!_" He swung his legs, once, twice, and then brought his knees up. "-_But I'm no one's hamster-!_"

He locked his legs over her neck and squeezed. Cynder roared as her path stuttered and started to lose altitude. A second later, and the air whistled as a purple, very angry ballistic warhead rocketed from a nearby island straight for her.

"-_Gimme' back _my_ human, you bitch!_" Spyra shrieked, colliding with Cynder's flank.

Cynder cursed and released her paws. The Fallen hollered as he lost his grip, and found himself hanging upside down with his legs still locked around Cynder's neck.

"-_Oooohhhhgodd-_" He screamed, seeing the pit yawning below them all. "-_My luck-!_"

Cynder kicked Spyra away, sending her rolling, before slapping her paws over his back and zipping down for the other side of the trench.

"_I'm not letting her have you. You're mine. Mine!_"

"-_Finders keepers-_" The Fallen apologetically cried as he slipped a knife from his hem. "-_The purple one got there first-!_"

He slit her arm just ahead of the bracelet, making her roar and drop him to the ground below.

Luckily she'd been flying low.

He rolled painfully and came to a stop in a patch of grass. The Fallen looked up and saw Cynder had dropped him on the other side of the chasm completely.

Well, it was a quicker method than island hopping.

"Run!" Spyra shrieked, landing next to him. The companions ducked into the woods, soon outpacing Cynder's very displeased roars as they echoed across the landscape.

Close call number-….

…They'd lost count.

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}**_

* * *

It was the next day that they reached it. The river.

"…It's liquid_ amber._" The Fallen huffed as he climbed up the last rock stack. They'd had to surmount the side of a waterfall to reach the canal's source feed. Where mist divided the river's flank, the water beyond it was no longer gray and white.

Here, it was colored like fire, and it sloshed like molten magma. A golden river, surrounded by mushrooms and creepers long down to the right and left. Beautiful.

"No, it isn't amber, it's just water colored like amber." Spyra smiled sadly, padding up to the black sand bar and sticking a paw into the drift. "The dragonflies think that the great Mayfly was entombed at the mouth of this river, and that all the dew he drank in life to pollinate the swamp flowers runs off in the water. I never believed that hot-crap for a second, but… but I still respect it, the river I mean."

The dragon turned to him and smiled, splashing some of the water at his feet playfully.

"My little basket came down it. It has to be with me in some way." She shrugged. "…But, uhm… I'm gettin' distracted. So, no bug-tomb where we're going, but... What do you think?"

"I'm not sure." He admitted, chewing on some of their ration berries. "But it's gotta' be better than the Apes."

"They're marching in the opposite direction now." Spyra noted. "Cynder's trying to catch us in a wall. Just smoosh the mob around, back and forth. Some of those shit-flinging tards have to run into us eventually. They already have!"

"All the more dangerous for them." He patted the new array of toys he'd been leisurely picking off the dead. A bandolier was over his tattered jumpsuit, stuck through with a handful of sticks of dynamite. A bolt quiver hung from his hip, and the crossbow it fed was strapped over his back with a fresh new pair of cleaver blades.

"How come _you_ get all the cool stuff?" Spyra crinkled her nose, circling him to examine the armory. "You're not the only one with opposable thumbs."

"But I _am_ the only one with pockets." He patted the bandolier. "Not all of us are keen on walking around naked."

"You're not complainin' though." She hip-bumped him. "Besides, dragons only shield themselves in _battle armor,_ or robes I've heard. Only the most regal of clothes are fit for our bodies. We got a reputation to keep."

"I hope you didn't pick all that up just by meeting Cynder…"

"No, she's like the anti-exemplar of everything I just said. Crazy bitch should stop hangin' out with monkeys and cutting up her own wrists." Spyra chortled. "-_Eeew, look at me, I'm Cynder, and I'm purtey. So so purtey. Look, I twirl my wrist and think it's cool.-_"

The Fallen laughed at her.

"_-I attack random people in swamps, and blow up caves,_" Spyra ranted. "_I take it up the ass from any good gettins, and scream at people I don't like. I have problems. Wuv me._"

"It does raise a whole lot of questions." The Fallen shook his head. "Who _is_ she? What's her goal here? She's obviously here for the crystals, and now _you._ But there's always ulterior motives. And most importantly; who do I have to beat down, skin or strangle to get at that pussy of hers."

"_Excuse me?_" Spyra squeaked.

"Nothing." He sucked up his own lips and hurried his pace. "Onward."

The river was quiet, aside from the slapping brooks and croak of frogs. Their conversations were normally quick before terminating, and long periods of silence followed between them.

It wasn't _bad_ silence, at least. Spyra was smiling the entire time. She had never explored, traveled or walked with anyone besides Firefly, and every once and a while, one of her adoptive parents.

Now she had her human.

_Her human._

Spyra examined his face, lacking a snout, cream-colored, and covered in skin. Despite his freakish height in comparison to her own, his upright stance and his alien attributes, Spyra would dare say that he was cute. Handsome.

_In a completely platonic sort of sense._

She gulped as her gaze wandered all over him. Maybe it was the isolation? But something about having the first warm-bodied male being near her daily, one that was biologically on the same level as her, was causing her much distraction.

Maybe some of that swamp muck had gotten in her mouth and infected her with a rare and disorienting disease? At least the impact would be less embarrassing, the more out of her control it became.

_Nah, I'm just lonely,_ she reasoned. _Lonely people don't think straight…_

They camped in a little alcove when the evening began to fall, reliant on the Apes being too far off to notice the little dot of light that was their minuscule campfire (eagerly lit by Spyra, who giggled at the thing incessantly afterward).

"Something just slithered past my paw!" Spyra gasped, gazing around the amber-colored water rapidly. They were both standing in the shallows, and she was doing her best to stand on her toes, keeping her wings and tail out of the surf like they would melt if she made contact. "_Falleeennn, _I don't like this idea!"

"Quit being such a baby." He waved her off, crossbow aimed and sweeping for targets. "You're a dragon _and_ this is supposed to be _your swamp._ Haven't you gotten in touch with your inner bear, or your inner cat a long time ago?"

"I'm not any of those things. Do these spines look like dorsal fins to you? I ain't a water serpent. My prey's always _terrestrial._" –She said that last bit with haughty emphasis. "Nice roasted elk haunch, or _rabbit's leg._ Now we're talkin'!"

"I'm sorry my culinary pursuits don't quite meet your standards." He chuckled, pinching an eye shut. "_I got you._"

"I don't mean to sound like a pompous ass or nothin', but dragons just have that higher standard than other folk do." Spyra grinned, chancing an examining glance down her spined back and tail. "Though, I'll admit a weakness for those berries you picked. But _red meat_, cooked through dragonflame? You've tasted nothing better in your whole-"

**_P-lkkk~! _**–screamed the crossbow. Spyra yipped and splashed onto her back. She breached the amber water sputtering.

"-Caught one."

She gawked as he held up the bolt with a twitching, silvery fish impaled through the flank on it.

"You cook, I cut."

"…I'm sorry." Spyra mumbled later that night, fish still rolling inside her mandible as she chewed.

"For what?" The Fallen was taking great care in handling the fish. On it went, through cleaned holder-sticks over the flames' flank, off it came to rotate once, twice, then onto a little flat stone for a makeshift plate.

Spyra paused for a moment to stare with intrigue at the little setup he was working. A survivalist's kitchen perhaps?

"For snappin' at you all the time." Spyra shrugged like it was nonchalant, idly poking at her last little slab of fish. "…It's, uhm… _ahem,_ rude. I haven't ever talked to someone who wasn't living ten or twenty feet away from me, and wasn't a quarter of my size."

She blinked at him playfully.

"You're the first guy I've met whose made me feel _small_." She thought about her own words and hummed. "And I appreciate everything you're doin'. You have no obligation to me, or my family or my brother. You could've just kept on-a-walkin', gone off to get back to this war of yours."

A heavy pause filled the air, and Spyra opened her mouth. Her eyes were cast back and a nervous sort of laugh happened from her.

"I _hate_ being sappy. It makes my scales crawl, it's why when I was a hatchling I hated Dragonfly School so much, they always wanted us to be _sappy_ for these plays they'd organize for all the grownups... But, like I had this little voice in my head telling me to touch those crystals, I have another one telling me to just spill the beans to you about… well, _me_. 'Cause I have this striking suspicion that you're not a man of common charity, but for me, you'll listen…"

"Of course I will."

"So… Dragonfly School. Dragonfly School, I… _uhm… _I never participated in any of the little plays they had us do for our parents. There were only three or four teachers the whole time I was there, village being small and all…" He settled in and listened to her talk. "Ms. Gatterwing was my teacher. Boy, did I make a handful for her. When I showed up for the first day of class, I ate my desk right in front of her and-"

"_Wait." _The Fallen held a hand up. "You ate your desk?"

"Dragonlings are hungry little shitters, '_specially_ the girls." She winked at him. "It was only as big as an apple, or something, like here, see my paw? No bigger than that. Anyway it was willow-wood, a little slab of it. For some reason, when I was little I liked to teethe on willow-wood a lot. So I just… y'know, bent down and snapped it up."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that! In front of the whole class too. They were in the pond on the side of the little classroom she'd made in the communal grove. All of them were gawking at me, and dad said you could hear the splinters snapping across the whole village. I was apparently very happy, while this was happening, I had a big ole' dragon-grin, eating my desk like it was an appetizer chip or somethin'." She demonstrated, showing off her pearly white razor teeth. "_Ah,_ but Ms. Gatterwing was a nice lady. I gave her more hell than she deserved."

"What about these plays?"

"Her and the other teachers thought it'd be cute if all the nymphs learned an old nursery rhyme and sung it for the village. I'd always sulk and chew on my talons in the corner during practice." She demonstrated the little pose for him, and he hummed laughter at her. "I was the '_Big purple girl with the tail and horns' _to the nymphs, and the '_Landwalker'._ All the other kids hated me because I didn't have to grow up in the water, they were jealous that I had _land-legs_ the moment I was born. So, with no friends, hating school, I grew up with Firefly and he showed me the ropes of being a dragonfly, living like one, navigating the immediate swamp around our village..."

Spyra smiled sadly.

"I think that little firecracker's been swallowed by every big predator in the swamp. He got eaten by a Toadwort a few days right before I met you. But saving him has sort of a gratification to it. I'm the big sister with the scary claws and teeth, so I gotta' save the day." Spyra lowered her sight to the campfire. "It wasn't that much different afterwards. I know you're sitting there waiting for a more complicated life story, but… but really that's it. I've never done anything spectacular except map out point A to B the world's largest cesspool of a marsh."

The Fallen witnessed true embarrassment for the first time from her. Even earlier this morning, there had been theater at play. Here? Spyra was showing off a lot of colors for how vulnerable she was making herself.

"…I'm an easy sort of soul to forget anyways."

He slurped noisily on his own last little cutlet, and smacked his lips when he was done, staring silently at the brooding reptile over the fire.

"Would you mind if I went over some things I've observed about you?" He asked.

Another nervous laugh. He tried to appear pleasant as the purple dragon bit her lower lip, her eyes bashfully meeting his. That blush was a hot pink. She was actually really cute, when you got past all the foul-mouthed tom-foolery and the loud noise.

"…You've been takin' notes or something?" She giggled with that slightly tanged accent that he couldn't place.

"Mental ones. I normally don't do that for a lot of people I meet. What I do isn't really so complicated at the end of the day, once you have context, but learning to understand people? Necessary for what I am. Hard to do."

"So you've met loads of people I bet." Her mood started to drain a little and she picked at her fish. Curled on the cave floor like a cat, her tail started to twitch, sending the golden-leafed tip flicking.

"A decent number." He kept his attention solely on her. "But I wanted to talk more about you, if you don't have any objections."

"…_Okay~._" She cupped the tip of her snout with a paw. There it was again, _wham,_ bashful blush-ahoy. Spyra was as volatile as the fire she breathed. One minute it simmered and existed solely as embers dancing on the earth. The next, and it reformed into a raging inferno on the drop of a hat.

"Number one; you react emotionally to things." He said right off the bat. "That isn't a bad thing. But you asked me to teach you about me, how to fight, how to survive, for yourself. The first step to survival and progress is understanding your own inner chemistry."

"Okay." Spyra pinched the fish cutlet between her talons and dropped it into her mouth, chewing quietly as she drummed fingers on her chin. "But you said I was a natural fighter by the canal. You also said you needed a _sen-say_ to refine you, I just think I need one to refine me."

"You think I'm that _sensei?_" He grinned.

"…_Ahem, assuming?_" The dragon cleared her throat. She was barely able to talk through her giggling. "…_I-I'd like it if you were~._"

"Number two; you need to get out more."

"Ouch, dude." Spyra flinched.

"That's not a bad thing either." He reassured her. "When I said people are hard to get, it isn't because they suck, or are horrible on principle. Though, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of that to go around. People are hard, because it's difficult to make them think about things that make them uncomfortable. People need to expand their minds to prosper."

"…So you're sayin' I need to expand more?"

"Bingo." He snapped his fingers. "And, I'd like to help you do that."

"W-Wow, that's…" Spyra was blushing madly now, staring at him with this dreamy sort of expression. She started to lean a bit closer, crawling around the rim of the fire towards him. "…_And what might be asked in return for such generosity, I wonder…_"

The Fallen kept an even expression as Spyra flopped down right beside him, leaned her flank into him and rested her head on his knee, looking up at him with big eyes.

"…I'm not asking for anything." He stammered.

"_Well,_" Spyra crawled up his lap, and laid a paw on his chest. She leveled her snout with the side of his head, and then planted a quaint little kiss on his cheek, using her lower lip for leverage on his salty tasting, human skin. Spyra licked at her teeth and giggled. "…_feel free to._"

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Dragon Temple}_**

* * *

Spyra spent the next morning wondering aloud to herself about her time in the amber river. Something about going back into her 'Birthwaters' or whatnot. He was pretty sure the word baptize was tossed around jokingly.

That dragoness was a mystery, oh boy.

One minute, mushy-ushy-gushy flirting and sensuality, the next manic hysteria, and then before you knew it, she was on top of you threatening to scoop out your eyes with a rusty spoon.

At least it made her fun, as well as _ballistic missile_ flavor went.

They found the ruins halfway through the next day's trek, over unwanted company.

"I found something." The Fallen called over, his blade producing a thick, squelching noise as he yanked it from the crumpled guts of an unfortunate Toadwort. The body melted like dissolving mud and became part of the shore.

"So did I!" Spyra laughed, pinching through the mucky remains of one of her own victims, and plucking out a single, golden coin from the viscera. "…_Wow…._ Wonder how this baby got in there…" It was minted in a thin bar of script, with the image of a dragon's head in the center on both sides. The Fallen stomped closer and whisked it from her claw. "-_Hey! _Finders keepers!"

"That might be our only leverage where we're going." He safely tucked the coin in the jumpsuit hem after brushing it off.

Spyra was mumbling to herself and kicking a rock when he lightly touched her wing.

"Fresh out of shiny baubles, dude, rob someone else…" She pouted.

"Look." He pointed at the head of the river. Spyra's mouth dropped open from what she saw.

There was an amber waterfall roaring from a level up. At the top of the cliff was a cracked archway. Pillars stuck out from the foliage nearby as did a loose path of gateways leading deeper into the knotted bramble.

There was a dome-like structure birthing from the plateau above. It had stubby windows of cracked, amber glass. Multicolored runes in a language neither of them could read straddled sills, support struts, and blended with green carpets of creepers who sought to overcome the brickwork and return it all to the earth.

Some of the gigantic mushrooms overhead allowed sunlight to dapple through on crimson and orange beams. These reflected off the bronze eyes of a massive statue sticking out of the center of the reservoir capping the river that the falls fed into.

It was a gigantic carving depicting a dragon in full battle plate. A male, judging by the musculature and weight distribution. His iron jaw was fixed in an eternal cringe of almost uncomfortable concentration. Spines ran down his back, down a powerful tail and tipped into a mace's head. He had four horns, daggering from his temples and rear scalp like flower petals. His paws were in front and center, like he was posing for a regal oil painting to feature his visage.

Creepers ate away at what chipped stonework didn't. His preened wings were mottled by the absence of the left entirely. Spyra and the Fallen walked to the edge of the shore and examined the exterior of the ruined structure and its décor.

"…He looks… _big_ too." Spyra gulped, eyeing the statue.

"Probably actual size." He grimly muttered, a dangerous sort of light blooming in his gaze. He slipped out his stolen Ape's blade and nodded for the temple. "What do you know about _that_ place?"

"…_Uhhhhh _that it didn't exist." She blinked. "I've never been down this far before! Following the river means getting closer to the Forbidden Funguswood." She nodded for some of the giant mushrooms looming overhead the ruins. "We're practically on its doorstep by this point. It curls west once you get past the foothills, and mom and dad forbid me to ever go there. _Ugh,_ I'm an idiot for not thinking of that!"

"You're not an idiot." He had known fairly well that following the river meant reversing. But that was goal number _two_ why lye in that darkness. That could wait. "Be on your guard, places like this rarely stay empty."

"Y-You mean we're going inside?"

"Is that a problem?" He stopped and looked at her.

Spyra let a manic, wild grin creep on her face as she hopped after him,

"Hell no, I was just makin' sure we _were_ this crazy." She nudged him. "I dig danger. Maybe there'll be some-"

He stepped near the edge of a horse-sized mushroom, and immediately both of them went rigid when the entire cap began to quiver.

The earth crumbled, roots cracked and leaves dusted away. What had once been a '_mushroom' _–turned out to be the bulbous, spotty abdomen of something much worse.

Eight bladed legs popped out from the crumbling soil and pecked into the ground. A hideous shriek sounded out through a bushel of pulsating mouthpieces, and a duo of green-spittle dripping chelicerae.

"_Eew." _The Fallen winced.

"-_Bulb Spiders! _Yeah-hah~! That's what I was about to say…"

The giant spider clicked and chattered as it crawled towards them in a quick pace. Another shriek further off, and another three of the creatures hopped or shimmied out from nooks and crannies in the woodwork behind.

"I hate spiders." He grumbled.

"First one to kill the most has to rub the other's paws!"

The Fallen grunted as Spyra vaulted off his shoulders and darted at the nearest spider.

* * *

{🐉}

"Did you hear that?" The Wingleader's voice pierced the shadows like a needle through cotton, making everyone freeze where they were.

After a moment of seeming nothingness, Torrdonal piped up with a hoarse hiss.

"I don't hear anything. It's probably the dump-off canal leaking again."

"No, I heard it too." Corrinthol shook his head, pointing at the southern end of the chamber with his black tailtip. "A scuffle! Right outside the main atrium, 10 yards minimum from the exterior wall."

"Oh dear," Taliopia gasped, her claws skittering as she scrambled farther back from the southern ring. "-w-what do you think it is? Does it have teeth? Or is it armed? Are there a lot of them? I-I can't breathe."

"C'mon, Tali', I'm right here! I'm right here, just… _in, _and out, in and out… There you go." Morinth soothed in the dark, Tali's wheezing now buzzing around the room. If that wasn't bad enough, the Night Dragoness then started to _sing… _"_Here we are, in our little peace-ful place~….._"

"Cap'n, can we shut her up?" Corrinthol growled through his paw-palm.

"_-Taking calm on the aiiiirrrr~ And that reeeedddd little drake, in the corner, must mind his tongue, lest I take it~_"

"That was a threat!" Corrinthol whined. "Did you see? She's the one who started it! This is why we get chosen for these kinds of things."

"I'm just an observer in all this." Torrdonal chimed.

"_Lack of squad cohesion._ Written in dripping, black ink. Yeah, and don't think I don't read the office's records, _ladies_." Corrinthol ranted.

"_Enough!_" Captain Harad barked, silencing the shithouse on the dot. "I command a section of warriors, not a cavalcade of insubordinate childlings. The Wingleader decides our course of action."

No response came from the north. The scuffle outside was in full swing. A terrible shriek pierced the air, and Taliopia whimpered, burying her snout in Morinth's side.

"_Mmmm,_ Bulb Spiders. Cheeky that." Morinth hummed. "My old training sergeant made a ridiculous Bulb Spider cutlet when I was in the academy."

"The rank will stick to orders and maintain silence." Harad corrected. "Wingleader?"

"_Ape steal._" The Wingleader muttered as she listened to the fighting. The ring of a blade, the crunching of chitin, the grunts of exertion from a non-arachnid combatant, and…

…the rush of dragonfire.

"Dragon's breath." The Wingleader paused. "They've come."

"Corrinthol, take to the upper level and watch the main gateway. Morinth and Taliopia, flank left and assault from the doorway there. Torrdonal, you're with me." Harad gestured with his earthen wingtips and his mace-ended tail.

"_Yessir._" Corrinthol dejectedly grunted. His wings flapped and he vanished into the shadows above.

"C'mon, _Talliiii',_ it's time for the war to give us a little taste." Morinth sang, yanking on the terrified medic's flank.

"_No, _Morinth! I-I can't fight! I'm a pacifist. I heal people, not hurt them!" Taliopia cried, stumbling after the darker female as she was dragged away.

"That medic is a liability I warned of, and it went unheeded." Harad sighed, addressing the approaching figure of the Wingleader. "Ma'am? You're free to partake in our operations as you see fit. But do mind your headspace, and don't interfere with the soldiers."

"I'm well aware of the handicap I am to your movements, Captain." The Wingleader didn't sound perturbed at all, in fact, she sounded quite pleasant, yet sharply intelligent. For her role, it was an unsurprising aura that she sported. "You won't even know I am here, and I'm completely confident in your abilities to subdue the servants of the Dark Army. Carry on."

"Right," Harad took position behind a pillar, folding his wings and curling up his tail, minding the weight its maced tip balanced on the end. "then stand back, ma'am. Your search can resume as soon as these bastards lie dead."

* * *

{🐉}

Morinth found a nice little space which was perfect for a spring attack. She wedged herself under a low-hanging window sill, and plopped the distraught Taliopia right behind her, always keeping their tails entwined, as was usual for the pair.

"-_how will I live with the moral-weight of it, Morinth?_" Taliopia moaned, now full-on crying into her own paw-palms as she bundled into a fetal position and started rocking, her tail tightening over Morinth's. "I can't kill people, even if they're mean! _This is why I never wanted to leave Tall Plains~! Oh my god, I'm gonna' DIE OUT HERE-!_"

"Oh _nonono,_ stow that baby-boo-load of doody right now, little lady. _Shush, shushshushshush…_" Morinth turned around and patted right between Tali's horns sympathetically. The medic was bawling, her pink wings curled feebly around her sides as she panicked. "We're soldiers of the New Kingdom, _Taliiiii~ And we do-not falllttteerrrrr~_"

"But, Morri-poo!" Taliopia practically squeezed out the shrill report of a dog's chew toy for how hard she embraced her darker scaled friend. Morinth's neon green eyes gleamed like emeralds in the dark, blinking blankly at the medic. "_I'm so scared, I… I think I- oo~!_ Oh my god, I just… I just peed a little bit…"

"_Sooooo,_ first thing's first, uh, _eew-_" Morinth wriggled out of her grasp and peered around the corner, trying to ignore Taliopia's sniffling as she gazed at the front wooden doors to the Dragon Temple. That was where the enemy would be breaching from. Her and the medic were needed if the ambush was going to work properly. She turned back to the mewling white dragoness in the room with her and rubbed her wingtips soothingly, wringing their tails together. "Second thing is, get yourself together. Tali', I know you. You have a head of steel and a heart of gold! It's all the beginnings of a great warrior, one that'll go down in history."

Steel rung outside and another Bulb Spider shrieked. Morinth ground her fangs, she stood on her toes and peered over the window sill nervously. Through the cracked amber glass, she could make out a jerking mesh of bodies going up the steps.

"It's okay, Taliopia, my doctoring 'ness, my _lovvveeeee~, _you will be just fine with me. We'll show that cocksucker-_uhm- _that big _poopy-head_, Corrinthol, that you've got the right stuff." Morinth grinned cheaply.

"_You're just saying all that to make me feel better._" Taliopia sniffled, wristing her eyes in an attempt to dry them. Morinth knew that when they were fully open, and Taliopia was in a much better mood, that they were colored a vibrant pink, just like her wings, and that they were the most beautiful pools of color she knew.

"No, I'm saying what I know to be true, my dear." Morinth nuzzled their snouts together, and bumped her breast into Tali's. "_Now get your concentration back, baby, and I'll reward you later._" She nipped the other dragoness' lower lip.

"You mean it, Morri-poo?" Taliopia wiggled her runny nose and gave puppy-eyes.

"Yes I mean it."

"_Okay~._" Taliopia embraced Morinth again, smiling happily as she nuzzled into her neck. "You're the best thing a dragoness could ask for. I'll fight the bad-guys as long as you're with me. W-Where are they anyway?"

"They're just outside that-"

The door came crashing off its hinges just around the corner. Someone grunted and a Bulb Spider screamed. Chitin crunched and wood splintered, then all went silent.

"…._inside_ that doorway." Morinth grinned sheepishly. Taliopia looked like she was about to shit herself. "_Alright,_ missy, move your tail, it's time to feast on Grublin intestines. _For WARFANNNGGGG~!_" –

Morinth grabbed Taliopia and thrust them both past the doorframe with a shrill duo of roars. One in battle-fury, the other in horrified terror. One could guess which belonged to who.

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo Reach Soundtrack: Long Night of Solace - Close Quarters}**_

* * *

Spider corpses soiled the once mightily beautiful stairwell. If Spyra were in a more reminiscent mood, she might've felt bad about the development.

But, her attitude didn't allow much room for consideration over a bunch of fuckin' people who had been dead for millennia. If you didn't want your lobby to be stained with blood ten thousand years later, maybe you should've made the structure shittier as to induce collapse earlier in the century.

The Fallen cried out as he shouldered under the dying arachnid's mass, and drove the blade into the underside of its thorax repeatedly, creating a geyser of spattering, white blood and gushing entrails that plopped thickly around his legs.

Spyra grimaced and looked back at the array of dead they'd left in a trail. Six had just been the start of apparently a whole nesting ground or something, because tens of the dead mushroom-camouflaged spiders were everywhere. Cut to pieces, squashed, impaled, burnt to crisps and run through with crossbow bolts. Spyra gave a nearby spider that she'd torched a light sniff and snorted.

It actually kinda' smelled like barbeque.

_Mmmm, sauce~_ the feisty dragoness licked her chops, and tapped her talons on her belly.

"_Yo,_ alien-man!" She called over nonchalantly, not even blinking as the Fallen screamed again, and hiked the gut-gushing monster over his bloodstained shoulders. "Hurry up the stabby and slashy so we can grab a bite to eat! All this cookin's got me hungrier than a ferret in a fruit tree."

"_-Raaahhhh~!_" The Fallen body-slammed the spider into the front doors of the ruined structure. **_Crash~! _**–the two heavy wood doors snapped off their ancient frames and collapsed into the space beyond, drowning the stairs in dust and dancing splinters.

The human stood from the wreckage, panting heavily as he stared down at the mangled corpse of his enemy. The spider's legs twitched a few times and then remained still. Its body had been shredded, and wood splinters were sticking through it all over the place, like someone had compressed it through a cheesegrater.

"Remind me never to piss you off." Spyra shivered as she trotted to his side. She coughed and swatted away at some of the lingering dust. "You think anyone inside heard us come in?"

"Funny." He grumbled, rolling his shoulder as he glared into the chamber beyond. It was a dark, rectangular gallery of sorts, the large room was laden with pillar rows going west and east, and the ceiling was intersected with tens of rotting, wooden support struts and ribs.

"It looks like a tomb." Spyra whispered. "I've found a few of those before! In the bog caves and methane tunnels, there's a bunch buried. I could never get any of the coffins open though… too heavy lids."

"You tried to open the gravesites of dead people?" He murmured with sudden distaste, stepping back from the wood and spider brand-mesh carnage.

"For educational reasons." Spyra grinned.

"-_FOR WARFANNNGGGG~!_"

A black blur zipped out from a portcullis leading to one of the ruin's side chambers. It traveled to them with a kick of something leathery that flapped on the wind. There was a feral snarl, a slice of metal to metal. Spyra didn't even have time to react before-

**_Clang~!_**

A pair of blades met right before her nose.

The Fallen had leaned over and drawn his sword, meeting halfway the vicious, overhead strike from a crescent of steel jutting from the tip of a pair of mounting rings. Those rings were locked around the tip's girth of a tail.

A dragon's tail.

A black scaled, gunmetal underbellied dragoness with striking emerald eyes, and four inwards-curved, silvery horns stood snarling in front of them. Her tail was tipped with the vicious crescent. It shivered against the Fallen's defense, digging into the metal as he refused to give ground.

"_You're not Grublins._" Morinth snapped through grit fangs.

"_Get away from my Morri-poo, servants of the Dark One!_" A dainty, white scaled dragon with pink eyes and wings zipped around the corner, brandishing a dagger-point cuffed around her tailtip. She scrabbled to a halt on the brick floor right next to Morinth.

Taliopia gave one bewildered look at the very angry human, experienced a twitch down her entire spine, and fainted on the spot, her scales rattling against pieces of the smashed door. Morinth sighed.

"Significant others, may you not live without them, but suffer their faults." She muttered, clicking her fangs as she worked the blade merger. "Cheeky that."

"_Hell-o, miss..._" The Fallen leaned forwards, his eyes bugging at the sight of yet _another_, quite fine, and shapely dragoness. "Do you frequent these ruins often?"

Morinth's jaw went slightly slack.

"_HEY! I'm. Right. Fucking. Here._" Spyra screamed and ripped at her own horns.

"_Corrinthol, now!_" A huge green-colored dragon with bronze ram-horns, covered in silver armor plate zipped from behind a pillar deeper inside the room. He opened his mouth, and a pillar of green-glowing rock flew from behind his fangs!

It sailed straight at the Fallen's head.

Torn from ogling the fresh durg-meat, the warrior ripped his blade from Morinth's crescent, and fell to a single knee, wincing when the magically conjured stalagmite grazed the top of his shoulder, drawing a bloody, crimson line through the jumpsuit. The projectile took out a chunk of the gateway frame behind him in a blast of dust.

"_Incoming~!_"

The Fallen grunted as a red and gold dragon fell from the ceiling and landed across his back. Corrinthol flapped his deep umber wings and wrestled the human to the brickwork, snarling, with flames whipping from his teeth as he did it.

"Stay down, tough guy, I'd hate to have rip off your-" Corrinthol retracted with a snort as he pinned the small of the Fallen's back, his green eyes wide in shock. "-_waitasecond,_ what the hell is this thing?"

With an iniquitous snarl, the human's elbow lashed out in a precise strike to Corrinthol's throat. The flame dragon made a comical choking noise as his airway was smushed, and he reeled from the blow. The Fallen looped to his back and kicked the soldier twice under the chin, the last strike causing Corrinthol to flip end-over-ass and crash into a wall.

Torrdonal ran past Captain Harad, flanked the two heroes, and opened his mouth before a swirling jet of magically projected water shot out with a firehose's strength. The cyclone whooshed as it tore through the air, white as a diamond and flickering with veins of rapidly rotating liquid, shimmering like melted silver.

Spyra jumped in front of the intended target, screaming as reams of dragonfire spewed from her throat and met the hydro-tunnel halfway. The two breath attacks produced a shockwave as they collided, water turning to steam whilst the two polar opposite beams struggled to diminish the other.

The Fallen jumped to his feet, kicking Corrinthol in the face as the fire dragon shakily attempted to recover. The draconic warrior squawked and tossed onto his gut like a limp fish.

Harad's evil mace-tail catapulted into view a moment later, but the Fallen jumped and flipped over the weapon's destructive route. He landed parallel to Harad's muscular rear legs, stamping on his green tail to keep it still. He sprinted up Harad's back, and held on tightly to his armored throat as the angry Captain bucked and roared in protest.

Acquiring a stick of looted dynamite, the Fallen grabbed a horn, yanked Harad's head back, and struck the fuse like a match off the corner of the dragon's protective helmet. He shoved the stick into Harad's mouth and distanced himself with a heavy grapple and toss, rolling to safety nearby.

Harad landed close by to Torrdonal. The dynamite bounced at his feet. The Captain rolled into a ball, green light flashing as a magically projected sphere of stone encased his previously vulnerable body. The dynamite exploded and drowned the whole western side of the room in smoke and sparks. The blastwave knocked Torrdonal silly, sending the weakened water dragon screaming as he flew through an ancient, now shattered amber window and tumbled into the reservoir outside.

"Who are these people?" Spyra huffed, lingering closer as she spouted out a last few drops of molten spit. "They don't look like Apes, and they certainly don't smell like 'em. Maybe we shou-"

The Fallen grunted when a massive tail smacked into his face, sending him careening on his own heels like a ballerina mid-spin. He crashed, senseless, against a pillar and fell on his face, unmoving.

Spyra was swept to the ground before she could even utter a peep. Two umber-colored paws pinned her by the breast, but maintained a sort of softness that suggested the identity of this attacker was… _different._ Different how? Spyra didn't know.

Atop her was a dragoness. And she rivaled even _Cynder_ in the looks department by a longshot.

Crimson bodied, with decorative umber fins, and yellow highlighted details streaming down her plated limbs and neck, the fire dragon had piercing eyes of orange, flared, almost Asian-styled facial fins and spines, and had two rugged horns. Her wingspan was immense. They spread like a pair of massive sheets on either side of her, pulsating like blood in the daytime sun's glare passing through the gate arch.

Spyra met the flame dragoness eye-to-eye, expecting the same kind of battle-weary expression she'd seen on every other dragon she'd encountered so far.

Instead, what she found was a look of shock dawning on the older dragon's face.

Nearby, the Fallen had glanced up from where he'd… ironically, _fallen,_ and went bug-eyed at the brilliant display of curvy, draconic femininity poised on top of the first bitch he'd been drooling over to begin with.

The poor warrior made a wheezing noise as he reached out to clasp the buxom masses of ovaloid flesh denoting the weight the dragoness possessed in her umber hindquarters. The Fallen's eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he face-smashed the cobble, a fist pumping into the floor as he landed on an unfortunately timed boner.

"_Ouch."_ He uttered, his dick getting bricked.

_There ain't no breaks for a portaljumper. Except all the wrong kinds._

"…_It's you…_"

Spyra's attention was reaffixed back on her attacker. The flame dragoness leaned down with wide eyes, her lower jaw quivering as all former intention left her.

The paws holding onto Spyra's breast weakened in their resolve.

"…_Introductions are a lot nicer when I'm not under you and on the floor, lady…_" Spyra grimaced, nudging her snout away when the flame dragon brought her own muzzle uncomfortably close. Spyra's nostrils flared. The older dragoness smelled exactly like cinnamon.

"It's actually you."

Spyra gasped as she was dragged off the floor, and crushed in an overwhelming hug. The flame dragon sat on her hinds, laughing hysterically as she smushed the poor purple beastess to her breastplates and squeezed giddily.

"_You're alive~! By the Ancestors' Grace, you've returned to us! I've found you! All of this time, and I've found you!_"

"Wingleader Ignitia, what is going on?" Captain Harad stormed up to the exchange and took a combat pose over the weakened human's form. The Fallen didn't give any signs of further resistance down there. Was he dead?

Spyra gasped for air as she un-stuck her face from Ignitia's chest and looked down at her alien friend.

"_Fallen? _Fallen! Get up, dude! I'm being-" She struggled against the hug, gasping when Ignitia started to cry as she was rocked like a favored stuffed animal. "-_I'm being molested~! By this crazy, cinnamon-smelling, annoyingly sexy bitch! Help!_"

"She's just an adorable little thing, isn't she…" Corrinthol rubbed tenderly at his head, sneering. "…I was hoping for some tally marks."

"…._Help…~! Guys…. Help…..~! I'm drowning!~ I… Oh wait…. I can swim….. Nevermind!_" –Came faintly from Torrdonal outside.

"Stand down, Captain, this is someone very, very important… Essential, really, to the survival of our people, and…" Ignitia breathed, but settled for a content sigh as she buried her nose into the top of Spyra's head. The purple dragoness squealed in disapproval.

"This _thing_ is a menace. It's dangerous. I will not stand down." Harad pointed hurriedly with his mace at the human on the floor. "I cannot identify its species. Some kind of Ape? Working with a dragon? Madness."

"It kicked me in the face!" Corrinthol whined.

"It hit on me." Morinth sneered, fanning Taliopia's face with her paw. The poor medic's mouth gaped and drool started to leak. She was out like a candle in a wind tunnel.

"It tried to drown me." Torrdonal gasped, dripping wet as he limped up the stairs and back into the temple lobby.

"It should be liquidated." Harad sneered.

"_It_ should be left to its peace until it can properly communicate with us." Ignitia shook her head, not releasing her poor mewling quarry. Spyra grit her fangs as she twisted and kicked. The larger flame dragoness didn't even take notice. "Then it can tell us how and why it protected the one thing that can save us from this war. Why it brought to us the Purple Dragon of Lore. Our savior."

* * *

{🐉}


	14. Chapter 13 - Pathfinder

**Dragon(s)layer**

**13**

* * *

**Pathfinder**

* * *

"**_This development changes everything. Our new enemies have proven that their reach is far, and that it runs deeply. I am not so quick to detract from what you are doing, hatchling, lest I be impertinent. But what has occurred has demonstrated to me that you are in need of aid._**"

Cynder blinked moisture from her eyes as she passed through the strain of copper clouds. The fluffy wall of flesh left in her wake was parted, leaving a quickly resealing gap daggered by the length of her wingspan.

She tucked her nose lower and breached the current with her breast and shoulders, lowering altitude, to gain a sweeping view of the Frontier Sea as it extended far and below her.

"**_Reinforcements travel to the Forlorn Watch as we speak. Your hailing for help was most proactive. I am… _pleased_ with your intuition. Forget not; your service, for all its faults, was never marred by so fickle a blemish in its entirety. You are my champion in this ordeal. I have only ever gifted to you what I have deemed the bloodiest of alleys in need of reorganization. I do not level what I am about to make you do out of punishment._**"

The ocean was almost a blood-red, caught in the tidings of late evening. This far below the brown cloud level just over her horns showed the blurred, burning girth of the setting sun. The colossal ball of dragonflame gradually hid itself over the lip of the oceanic horizon. It emblazoned an upside-down pyramid of golden caterpillars inch worming down the center of the sea in parallel with her line of sight. Cynder's white eyes reflected a golden tint as she dreamed mid-flight.

Being airborne was in a dragon's blood. Yet somehow, she always found her thoughts becoming loftier every instance she leaped from the earth and took a prolonged journey to another landmass.

She supposed she'd been stuck mourning in that wretched tower for so long, that she had forgotten the pleasantries of foreign air and diversity.

Luckily, her wings were powerful enough that she could easily halve her own flight time and be in the accursed Dragon Realms within the same day.

"**_The war has been shifting while you were away, hatchling. The Daragon Coast is your destination, home to the town of Oversight, Queen Lillith's realm that she arrogantly forgets in her hours of botanistic withdrawal inside Castle Crownhorn. My generals are already overseeing the assault to crush the Northerners' 'Kingdom of Vines'. The siege stalls, but you are not there to influence that._**"

Cynder eyed the west as she flew, Malefora's words replaying themselves as ghostly echoes in her mind. The Frontier Sea was too vast to view the Ancient Sea from this distance. By extension, the Dark Continent, and the volcanic home of her Mistress were hidden miles and miles away over the horizon. But Cynder could practically feel her gaze. The growing aura of unnatural shadow emerging over the west was growing every day. If the invasions over the waters had already started, that meant that Malefora was going for broke.

She wanted Warfang. And she was willing to kill and burn her way across half the Dragon Realms in order to reach the holy capital of their kind. The Dark One had spent the better majority of the last few years gathering her forces. Cynder had united the Ape tribes beneath the chieftain kings, and Malefora had forged the new Dark Army. Four strongholds of shadow.

Monkano, Forlorn, Concurrent, and the Dark Continent.

Warfang was outnumbered four to one. The end was coming.

**_"Behold. I send you to find this one. He is cunning. He is dangerous and he has never failed me. He blends shadow with speed and accuracy. The perfect assassin. Find him in the wartorn Daragon Coast. Our hold in the south depends on it._**"

Cynder felt belittled by it all.

Being forced to seek _help._

Not even hours after Malefora had violated her mind for the first time in years in an attempt to dispel the Fallen's enchantment.

-Which was _still_ fucking eating away at her to this moment. She had relented from saying anything to her Mistress after the horrid '_treatment' _she'd been subjected to. But she had an inkling that Malefora knew it as well.

What else was there to do without risk of killing Cynder? She'd toughen the enchantment out. She'd been dealt far worse.

_If it even is an enchantment._

The copper sea and sky made her reminisce this strange feeling. A pattering sensation, like a colony of moths nesting in her gut. The human's form and physique. But most of all the sensation of his un-scaled skin brushing her hide.

Cynder _needed_ to feel that again. She'd already determined that she wanted the Fallen alive, and had been pained being forced to tell her soldiers to capture him either or. If she'd made her fascination too obvious for Malefora… there was no telling what the Dark One would do.

Cynder had poured through her little library in the Forlorn Watch's observatory. She ripped through stolen books, historical records, tomes and scrolls, and not once had there ever been a mention of anything called a _human_ throughout the Old Kingdom's history. Even predating Malefora herself and the foundation of the Guardians. Nothing at all.

This otherworldly being escaped her literary reach and her emotional.

Gigaw's proddings being dismissed: Cynder desperately wanted to _talk._ Sheerly because there was no one in her life to ever have done so with. These issues eating her insides made her quick to anger, irritable, and constantly seeking the attentions of another.

Even though the crazy simian had _stabbed her,_ Cynder couldn't rid herself of his fingertips. Soft little skin-nubs that had glazed over her majestic, crimson plated breast.

She had never allowed another to touch her in her life. But Cynder was prepared to let the Fallen touch her like that again, if only just to remember what the sensation had felt like.

_I could've encountered him in the swamps myself during a patrol, captured him, bound him and carted him back with me. I wouldn't have brought him to that crumbling ruin. No, Forlorn wouldn't have sufficed. I'd have brought him to Concurrent. To my home._

Cynder shivered, flapping her wings to gain her altitude back. Her body felt like it was being coursed by a pleasant little tingle of electricity. At the mere thought of such a fantasy.

Her castle was dark, and shrouded in mystery, but most of all: it was _private_.

High in the floating crystal islands of Concurrent Skies, hidden away in the magically conjured Blue Hurricane that had been concealing the cavernous airborne landmasses since the first ages was her fortress. The thought of dragging the Fallen inside, binding him over the tiled floors, hanging him from chains, letting him mount her…

Cynder wasn't even hiding the infatuation from herself anymore. She could rant and get angry all she wanted and it wouldn't change the facts.

The Fallen had done something to her with his touch, some kind of effect that followed him wherever he went, and only impacted beings of her type and construction.

Cynder was going to capture that pristine, vitalic alien male. And she was going to kill that little purple bitch that was currently starving her of his company. He would be all hers.

But first, she needed to fulfill her master's wish.

No matter how much she loathed doing so.

Land came into sight. It crawled over the sea and started to shield the dropping sun. Coastal cliffs and skiffs of creamy sand swathed out to the far east and throated in the north. The black shapes of warships bobbing in the surf were ant-sized dots as she gained altitude. It was impossible to tell the identities as naval units hung back and waited for night to pass before resuming hostilities. The crude constructions of Ape dreadnoughts contrasted the rich crimson and gold-trimmed steam-ships of the moles, the dragons' ancient allies and protectees.

Larger ships made of molten earth and pulsating crystal emerged in greater numbers from the west. The Dark Army's navy.

The crone of warhorns etched out in the backdrop, as did the occasional, hollow report of an explosion and whoosh of fire. Tiny dots that resembled spiraling flies over the coast signified the presence of aerial combatants on both sides. Though this ambiance bled across the entire coast like a macabre blanket of interspersed happenstance, it centered thickest over and around Oversight.

Oversight was an artificial sprawl on the otherwise natural coastline of the Dragon Realms. The walled draconic town had black soot rising in towers from many a place. Fires brewed on the beaches its cliff walls overlooked as engines of the Dark Army- destroyed in the initial landings –continued to burn. Every so often, a broiling fireball, launched from a catapult or a mole cannon would careen in the respective angle, leaving behind a black arc of soot, and would land in a muted _whump~! _–that would thunder up and down Daragon.

Cynder's inner turmoil was briefly silenced as she considered indulging the warrioress side of herself by engaging in combat with the Northerners. But this theater wasn't hers. At least _not yet._ She needed to find her goal and get out of this war with him. Get back to her tower and finish _her war_ first.

Cynder swept low and fledged out her wings, making sure to keep them daggered, with the brunt of the wind beating off the spines instead of the membranes. She didn't want to be known in her excursion. The last thing she needed was her own trademark scream echoing across the beach and letting every eager dragon champion loyal to Lillith know that the Terror of the Skies had entered the scenario. This needed to be quiet.

The surf bucked against the coast with white foam against rocks and sand. She slipped over it and a pair of wrecked hauler ships that had been used to disgorge friendly soldiers. These dark transports lye as black, mangled corpses interspersed up and down the beach, their bellies cracked open and their masts collapsed. Some of them were burning.

Impact craters and rock fields mostly after that. Bonfires ringed with shuffling little ants, skeletal siege engines and dispersing bat-like fliers. Cynder targeted the nearest campsite, offering the overhead visage of Oversight's cliff-topped walls a disdainful sneer.

She landed and readied her heels in sandy, dead grass, her white eyes narrowing as clinks of steel, surprised grunts and mournful groans symbolized the presence of others.

Armored, cloven heels crunched in the grass on all sides as she was quickly surrounded. Cynder preened her wings and then concealed them to fold. She gave an austere crane of her neck, and grunted when a motley assortment of black shapes- ones slightly larger than even her –shuffled closer.

"_Mistress,_" Droned a gravely, deep-seated voice. "we almost mistook you for a dragon seeking honor-death."

"It would've been the last mistake you made." Cynder chanced a second-long smile, answering the attempt at humor with a darker side of her own.

"My lady."

The creature sacrificed a knee and bowed its crocodilian, armored head, a double-handed battle axe sticking into the grass butt-first. Nearly twenty other examples of this hideous, gangly creature followed suit, all kneeling in a ring of worship around the black dragoness.

_Orcs._

Cynder snorted and reached up to shove her brooch into her snout.

Mushrooms, Apes, death, _Orcs._ There was always some offensive odor to do battle against, forget the fucking war.

"We were informed by Lord Urukal that you would bless us with your presence. You seek our pathfinder." The same Orc righted himself before the others, a snarled excuse of a grin developing on his underbitten, hideous jaw. His fangs were disorganized and yellow. Cynder found it a miracle the abomination could manage speech so fluently, especially seeing as Orcs were some of the more brutish of her master's earthen-borne creations, known to be even more barbaric than Apes.

"Yes." Cynder said, her eyes sizing the Orc up. "You are an officer?"

"Indeed, my lady." The Orc chuckled. "Taskmaster Gulukai, overseer and director."

"You will take me to my charge."

"Right away."

Gulukai parted his squadron of armored Orcs with but a wave of his claw. The beasts' labored, ragged breathing was the only ambiance for a while as he led Cynder through the mob.

They all stared at her with a strange mix of adoration and hunger. Tens of beady little red eyes gleaming in the evening dusk underneath triangular, horned helmets. Cynder had to let go of her brooch to walk and immediately regretted it.

These Orcs _stunk._ Like feces and corpses. She peered over several of their shoulders and witnessed a mangled elk stuck through a spit and charring over the burning timber. A trio of green Grublins chattered and wrestled over a discarded bone in the sand at one of the Orc's feet. The whole encampment was like this. The beach had become infested, just like Malefora had intended.

"The siege has lasted a month. In that time, we were repelled from the shores six separate times by dragons attacking from the air. Naval bombardment was nearly ineffective. Only a Wing brought in from the Dark Continent, and the actions of our champion pathfinder were able to secure a beachhead for the invasion to commence." Taskmaster Gulukai relented, edging his hideous, reptilian mug past his shoulder at her. "The champion pathfinder you seek, I might add. Lord Urukal is most anxious about having him removed from combat, especially when Daragon is so close to falling."

"Urukal will survive such a surgical relocation." Cynder rolled her eyes, disinterested in maintaining the conversation.

"Of course, my lady." Gulukai said. "I am not a conduit for his concerns, understand, but as Taskmaster, Urukal has placed in me a set of responsibilities that warrant my asking."

"You have been promoted?"

"Upon the death of my predecessor, yes." Gulukai's black tongue swiveled about his teeth, and he spoke with a wet burble of musing. "Taskmaster Lukpom met an unfortunate end at the hands of mole riflemen. He was blown to tatters and stringed into the surf as soon as he leaped off the carack."

"Unfortunate."

"Very much so. The Northerners drew first blood in cauldrons, but our superiority in numbers and quality saw the day. The dragons felled were appropriated by the Apes for ceremonial feasting. I was most tempted to join them."

Cynder answered that with silence. Strangely, despite everyone in this conversation being a practiced killer, the idea of her regal kin being eaten by her army…. disturbed her.

A cannon shot landed not too far off in the campsite. The explosion was like a crack of thunder. Over a hill rise, fire bloomed and the flaming carcasses of Grublins and an Orc or two hurled themselves down to the ground below. When bones became blackened by heat, they tended to crumple like cheap charcoal when subjected to trauma. Listening to their spines crack was like hearing a thin woodland stick snap.

Gulukai didn't even take notice as he jogged to the other side of the camp. The walls of Oversight were high overhead, up the spanning maze of cliffs. Cynder sneered as she hunkered lower and used her enhanced, draconic eyesight to sweep the tops of the defense palisades.

Moles, armed with crossbows and flint rifles, scurrying everywhere like the rodents they were. Brass, floor-mounted cannons topped with barrels carved to resemble dragon heads. One belched occasionally and rained another comet of death on the beach below.

"Taskmaster, time is not an ally for either of us." Cynder hissed as they reached a patch of thin foliage. "Where exactly do you think we're going?"

"Forgive the detour, mistress." Gulukai breathed, pointing at the brush. "But our pathfinder does not reside within the garrison."

"Then where the hell is he?" Cynder laughed sourly.

"Engaged in reconnaissance at the edges of the enemy walls. He's been observing Oversight's defenders for the last week."

"And his general location?"

"By the copse of trees, there, several yards from the farthest cliff face beneath the walls."

Cynder kicked her wings and blared past Taskmaster Gulukai faster then the Orc could blink.

"_Beware the woods, my lady!_" –His ragged shouts met her in the distance as she vanished into the shaded woodlands. "_Enemy scouts are in there too!_"

The woods at least offered some degree of quiet, if you didn't mind the staccato ring of siege weapons dully firing overhead. Cynder quietly slipped across the foliage on all fours, ringing trees.

Only when she reached a small clearing did she pause, her breath heavy from the exertion of the sprint. Some crickets chirped nearby, and the trees oversaw everything in a glossing canopy of dark browns and blacks. The sun was almost entirely gone by this point and the forests around Oversight's lowlands were getting swallowed by shadow.

Cynder sniffed the air. Finding the usual scents of pine needles, wood, soil, grass…

But death too. Spilled blood, relatively fresh. There was no mistaking that metallic tinge. Not even here in this hell.

Cynder examined the clearing for a short while before casting an accusatory glance to her flank. She crossed some distance and swept aside the snapped hulk of a fern, crinkling her nose when she revealed a corpse underneath the branches.

It was a Mole, still wearing his black and gold combat armor, and a set of little spectacles that crookedly remained on his nose even in death. He'd been slashed open from shoulder to hip. The puddle was starting to become part of the ground.

_His handiwork no doubt._

Cynder looked up. The little alley through some trunks showed the scene of a massacre. At least eleven more Mole warriors, elegantly carved swords and crossbows haphazardly loosed next to their cadavers. Two of them had been decapitated. Organic gruel created now crusting trails that linked the cleanly sliced stubs of removed limbs and heads to the torsos they had come from. Some of the blood was black. There were maybe six or seven Grublins and a pair of Orcs meshed in with the pile. The Orcs were of a thinner build, with red plated armor.

Archers. One of the two breeds of their kind solely created for war. Cynder wondered if one of them was her quarry. She'd almost be relieved if such was true.

_Footprints, and an unlinked trail._

Cynder was careful not to touch any of the dead as she traipsed through the thicket. She bent lower and viewed the carnage wrought upon the bloody grass. A clear indicator of movement showed footsteps and broken twigs leading to an edge in the fighting. Black blood dripped in interspersed globules between steps.

A little groan caught her attention. Cynder looked down at one of the 'corpses' and sneered as the Mole twitched, lying face-down in the dirt.

The black dragoness stepped closer and rolled him over with a poke of her bladed tail. The rodent gasped, his arms flopping across his ruined chest as he was forced onto his back to view the darkening sky.

He had a pair of mechanical goggles strapped over his eyes. Cynder could hear the lenses inside whirring as they focused on her face from below.

"…_T-Terror of the Skies._" The mole whispered hoarsely, blood flecking over his chops.

"Indeed. Your target appears to have escaped you, rat-man." Cynder looked back at the dead Orcs. "Which way did he go and how many of you are left?"

The Mole gurgled, the proud, crimson and gold helmet on top of his diminutive little head rolling off to lay still just over his scalp. He slouched and the tense muscles in his neck relaxed. Cynder sighed in annoyance.

They always had to die when it was inconveniencing.

Metal clashed and someone nearby shouted. Her wings flapped and she shot through a pair of trees, leaving the site of the battle.

The commotion was coming from one of the subsidiary cliff faces, the steps leading up to the foot of Oversight's walls. A single Orc battled a trio of Moles wielding glaives. Cynder readied herself to join in the engagement, but found there was no need.

The Orc- despite suffering slash wounds across his breast and left leg –flipped, head over heels, in a backwards roll. He carried himself from the slashes of the Moles and righted atop a boulder, a crossbow readied in his one claw. The weapon kicked and a Mole screamed with a bolt sticking out of his furry throat.

Another closed the distance and swept at the Orc's feet. The Orc jumped, landed beside his attacker, and brought a dagger in his other claw across the smaller warrior's face.

The Mole screeched like a mouse caught in a trap. He tossed back with an incision opening him from his jaw-hinge to the brow on the opposite side of his head. When he fell, the Orc had already reloaded a second bolt, and the last Mole died when the round punched between his eyes and sent him sprawling.

Cynder landed on the edge of the plateau and preened her wings, staring across the bodies at the Orc with her soulless white eyes.

For a moment, the Orc paused, his breathing labored as he reloaded his crossbow again, slipping the bolts from a bandolier wrapped across his painfully narrow waist. He regarded her with little red eyes under his helmet, his yellow teeth bared in a constant snarl.

"Zargos the Pathfinder." Cynder greeted.

The Orc closed his mouth, and snorted up a trail of blood that was leaking. He remained silent.

"I bring word from the Dark Mistress." The black dragoness said. "You're being reassigned."

Zargos sheathed his dagger, swaying a bit as he stood to his full height and continued his staring. Cynder was expecting the usual gruff voiced, overzealous and cocky barbarian that all Orcs inevitably wound up being. Instead, when Zargos spoke, his voice was just an octave above an agonized whisper.

"M'lady." He belatedly uttered, bowing his head slightly.

"I need you to come with me." Cynder folded her wings and nodded back towards the beach, now in view from their height on the cliffside plateau. "Word comes through me from the Dark Continent itself. Malefora requires your talents."

Orcs had trouble with any other kinds of facial expressions besides contemptuous sneers and angry frowns. But Zargos looked like he wanted to say something. The battle fatigue was still draining from his system. He merely closed his jaws and gave a little bow again.

"M'lady." Was all he parroted.

* * *

{🐉}

Zargos said nothing when Cynder brought him back to the very beach he had fought so hard to take with his erstwhile kin. Malefora had been prepared. There was an Ape carack waiting just off the rocks for him, and a small dingy was beached with a trio of the simian warriors lumbering about to transport him.

Cynder had never fought beside Zargos the Pathfinder before, but from what she had heard about him, his prowess was certainly a spectacle as was her own.

Zargos had been fighting since the beginning of the war. He was reputedly one of the oldest Orcs in the Dark Army and had survived earlier campaigns where the Dark Army had secured holds on the mainland and had summarily been driven back. He had lived through more battles than even Lord Urukal, and Urukal was Malefora's most decorated Orcish general in her entire army.

Zargos had very little to say as the black dragoness told him everything that had been happening in the southern swamps. The prophecy of the Purple Dragoness being born. The flaming asteroids from the sky. The rise of the _Fallen._ Zargos didn't speak, but she could tell when his interest piqued due to the inclinations of his crocodilian head. He would raise his chin whenever Spyra and the Fallen came into play.

When Cynder was done, they had reached the dingy and stood before one another, 'ness to Orc, before the end of their brief meeting.

"The flow of Mana Crystals from the south is dependent on my tower. The Purple Dragoness doesn't just threaten our source of soldiers, but the very foundations of the Dark Continent." Cynder spoke. "We both toil to find her and limit the inevitable damage she will deal."

Zargos made a small grunting sound, and looked off towards the carack bobbing in the waves past the beach. Even the Apes by the dingy looked intimidated by his presence. He was covered in scars, his armor was ancient and worn and the red color was starting to fade. He was missing a finger on his left claw, and one of his cheeks had a permanent divet carved into it from a past blow to the face.

"Do you have any questions regarding your quarry?" Cynder allowed herself a brief smirk. "Given their _unique_ nature and status."

"The stories that the dragons have spun." Zargos' voice sounded like magma bubbling, or like there was tar in his throat. "They were true all of this time. I believed our Commando teams were being wasted, lingering in the tombs of the dead and the warrens of your kind's soothsayer monks."

The Archer paused.

"Why haven't _they_ been gifted my new task?"

"Malefora practices compartmentalization." Cynder reminded glumly. "One messenger is rarely aware of another, least of all whom they travel to meet. I'm quite certain your comrades have been selected for due quests themselves."

"The Lady of the South is no mere messenger." Zargos narrowed his beady little eyes. "The Dark Mistress rarely acts so brashly. If the situation is as grave as this suggests, I'd beg of you to tell me."

"It isn't like I was swept away to maintain transport coherence at the foot of the volcano." Cynder sighed. "The Daragon landings apparently leave little wiggle-room, so to speak, for any others. Malefora believed you should hear it from the next best thing to the source. The flight was not long."

Not that Zargos had any inclination to give a shit. Cynder was small-talking.

"Your reputation precedes you." Zargo said out of the blue. "I was curious when I saw you land before me, freshly covered in blood from victory. I almost was convinced that the end had grabbed me in my absence of thought, and I was hallucinating. But, nevertheless, the Terror of the Skies herself has gone out of her way to collect a lesser savant of the Dark Continent. _Me._"

"Whether it is for better or worse I am all too real." Cynder huffed, snorting at her brooch as the sea-salt started to grate on her nerves. "My Mistress told me you have repeatedly refused positions as an officer. I can read your talents in your speech. Why do you do this to yourself?"

"Why do any of us do what we do, m'lady?" The Orc chuckled. "I live for the hunt. The Dark One bids me to draw blood for her, and so I shall. Such is one's born purpose. I shall take my leave."

He started to stomp towards the dingy. Cynder held up a wing and stopped him.

"_Wait._" She choked, still deciding whether to speak aloud by the time she said it anyway. "There is more."

"M'lady." Zargos paused.

"I discussed to you compartmentalization. There is an addendum to these instructions of yours, Zargos, and it is one that I have no doubt will complicate things for your inner mind." Cynder breathed, and said very quietly. "The _Fallen_. I want him alive."

"Has the Dark Mistress not instructed his death?"

"_I_ have instructed his capture." Cynder said dangerously. "And it is the closest word you are to receive above all else. Malefora punishes, but so do I. Do I make myself clear?"

Zargos remained silent for a second. Then, there was another little bow of his head.

"Yes, m'lady."

"Good. Bring to me the Fallen alive, and bring my Master the Purple Dragoness' head mounted on a pike. Leave the excuse for the Fallen's disappearance to me and me alone." Cynder nodded for the boat. "My men will start you on your journey. You are on your own from that point on."

"Understood." Zargos bowed. "My hunt will reap fruit."

"See to it that it does." Cynder's claw extended, and when her talons opened, Zargos stared at a small black pearl clenched in her palm. "Take it."

Zargos pinched the little stone and put it in a sash. He bowed lower. Cynder took one last look at Oversight. The walled town would hold yet, and the towering triple spires of Castle Crownhorn sat vigilant over all the soot and the night sky, now highlighted silver by the rising blue moon.

"We'll be in touch." She stated, before her wings kicked, and she was a black strip vanishing over the sea's horizon.

Zargos watched her go and sneered at the beach.

Inner politics made him sick. But as long as it meant him getting out of this fucking meat grinder, the Orc was all in for any assassination contract he could get. He'd hunt down Mistress Cynder's quarry. He did better alone anyway.

"Those look like sum nasteh bites those do." One of the Apes lumbered closer, examining the blade-wrought wounds fresh on Zargos' body. "Ya want a bandage or sumthin, boss?"

"That isn't necessary." Zargos looped around him towards the dingy. "And I am eager to leave."

* * *

{🐉}

The flight back felt quicker. It was probably because some kind of weight had been lifted from Cynder's wings.

At least she knew there was some preservation of her ideals from someone other than herself.

She landed back at Forlorn's observatory, and, preening her wingspan on the balcony plat, she gave a pleased hum as she saw a pair of metallic objects seated in the center of the observatory chamber.

A pair of lead-colored pods, swept and roughly egg-shaped. Both the size of large wagons, sitting ominously on the tiled floor.

The pods. The ones that had _fallen_ from the sky. Tinker must have had them delivered up the flight of steps. Cynder hummed again, this time, considering the difficulty of lugging the obviously very heavy alien objects up an entire tower's chute of stairs.

The black dragoness stepped off the nighttime balcony and into the chamber, her eyes glazing over the alien pods. She ran a claw down the flank of one, marveling at the slick, perfectly smooth metal. It was far beyond the capabilities of the Dark Army or the Northerners to construct something so… _streamlined._

It confirmed as much as everything else just how alien the Fallen, and wherever he came from, really was.

Cynder didn't understand where he would've gotten inside the unit. There were no visible openings or buttons or latches anywhere. She tried picking at it with the tips of her talons, the blade of her tail, and at one point (though she glanced around before doing so to keep face) she _did_ nibble on it a bit hoping for her teeth to answer the question.

Shit almighty. She was like a quarreling little monkey fawning over the technological brilliance of a god.

"You fall into our world, wound my mining operations, stir up the pot of my lordess and her lieutenants, and you slaughter a cadre of my soldiers…" Cynder sat on her haunches and leaned into one of the cool pods in defeat. "…_You ignite a fire in my body_."

Cynder traced a talon over the space where the sword wound used to be on her breast. The markings tattooing her body flared in the dark, barely illuminating themselves with colors of dark blue to match her shadow element.

Cynder sighed as she worked down from the stress of the last few days. Her body was so tired and yet so desperate at the same time.

She couldn't even describe the void she was suffering right now. There was an emptiness that bit her and clawed her. Her paw wandered down her breast and she slid lower onto the floor of the observatory.

"_Ah~._" She grit her teeth and hissed, peering down as she moved a shapely, feral leg out of her path.

She knew the temperate air would only make it worse. The swamp's atmosphere was a mood killer, to be sure. But being so close to her homeland had allowed all kinds of things to wander in her mind, and her hormones to free themselves up.

In the darkness, partially illuminated by her body artwork runes and the blue shimmer of the moons outside, her draconic slit glistened. Its folds were puckered, and the delicate, pink lips protecting its exterior were puffy. The red scales trenching it in at the sides were flushed with blood, and arousal dripped in a handful of wet beads that fled down the length of her labia.

Cynder breathed through her mouth and stared at herself with admonishment.

_Damn it._

She chanced a look at the closed doors leading down to the chute. The distant sound of forges and Ape hoots told her that company was an unlikely occurrence. Neither of her Cold Legionaries or her Orderly were here either.

Gigaw must have wandered down to inspect the forges again. Or, he had appropriated an overseer's whip and was tormenting the slaves in the lower catacombs. _Again._

_"….O-Orderly?_" Cynder asked in a whisper, just to make sure. No response. Biting her lower chop, the dragoness looked back down at her loins and sighed.

_It had been a while anyhow. No time anymore these days._

Slipping off the alien pod, Cynder rounded it and headed towards the back of the observatory. Through an arch, her makeshift study stood bathed in blue light from the little window. Maps of the swamp with red X's drawn through all the tombs and ruins she had recorded lie sprawled on an end table beside her scroll shelves and the bookcase. Her nesting was beyond that, made from piled furs, rolled carpets and a ring of fine polished stones.

She laid in it and immediately fell to her side, spreading her hind legs again to dip her talons gingerly in the culmination between her thighs.

Two talons spread her lips and another two sank into the warm folds they were protecting. Cynder sighed as she wriggled her fingers in a circular motion, working herself over with her tail curling slowly underneath and ahead of herself.

Cynder was in debate about a suitable partner to fantasize about. Her immediate reaction was to picture a strong drake wreathed in some kind of cooler shade of scales. She always did like males colored in contrast to her darker hue, and while Night Dragons tended to be thinner in their constructions, Warfangian Northerners had bulk and girth on their side. Males from the North were always filled out more and with handsome sculptures making their finned facial details.

Cynder huffed as she finger-fucked herself, rich draconic fluid running in translucent trails down her groin to pool around her anus and the thick base of her tail. She arched her back to present her breast, one of the most erogenous zones on a dragoness past the treasured valley beneath her tail.

She was a prime hen, she'd always been. The mutations that had grown her from the egg had been keen on following a set of- perhaps –_too_ perfect a female model.

Cynder was heavy in the rear, lithe at the waist and front limbs and fat-thighed. Somehow through all of that curvature, her muscles had been appropriately distributed. She still had the strength to crush rock. It just was distracting sometimes that while she was powerful, she was also a freaking sex symbol.

Part of her knew Malefora had done that on purpose.

Maybe it was a mockery through flesh of the North.

_Look at what I've done to your gene-stock. A deadly, but breedable little hen that I've created to doom you all._

Cynder git her teeth and upped the anty. She dug practically her entire paw into her cunt and spread out her talons, gapping the quivering, dripping trench walls inside with a tiny moan slipping past her fangs.

She gyrated her hips in the air and fucked her own fingers, trying to sink them to the palm into her own canal as juices continued to leak in torrents from her. Bit by bit, she worked herself closer to a rising plumage of heat building up in her thighs and her inner core. Sweat glistened her black limbs as she worked herself into a fervor, humping up from the nest with little growls coming out of her throat.

The imaginary male was looming over her, stabbing her mercilessly with his draconic member as it punctured her defenses and dug deeply into her trench. The little ridges running along the rod's length ground against the tight velvet sealing it in, advocating fertility to cycle through and prepare her womb for the insertion of his genetic gift.

Cynder heard a paper rustle somewhere inside the room as she masturbated. She pinched an eye open and gazed around the study.

It had just been a draft from the observer plat outside. The night was cool tonight and the wind was acting up.

But looking around tore her from her fantasy when she laid eyes on the leaden pods sitting in the lobby.

Her chest lit on fire and Cynder's mental imagery started to shift.

Now, instead of a vibrant drake rutting her, she envisioned the creamy-limbed _Fallen._ The human had stripped his torn jumpsuit and had mounted her belly, using those thin fingers for leverage on her hips. He pistoned into her and plunged his member inside Cynder's flower with a rugged ruthlessness that she felt wasn't even in her own mental making.

Cynder growled possessively as she orgasmed, her tunnel quivering over her talons as slightly milky ejaculate blended with her drippings. She made one hell of a mess. Squelches echoed around the room and her eyes opened in a sort of drunken stupor. The ceiling shifted as a bubble of euphoria slammed into her skull, and she rode out the torrential downpour of her sexual satisfaction.

Flapping her wings and whipping her tail, Cynder moaned quietly and let her horns sink into the bedding beneath her.

_Fuck all,_ she needed that. She'd needed it badly. You could never argue that rubbing one off at least temporarily undid the daily hazard of living.

She still felt alone, however.

Cynder sighed and slipped her paws away from herself, rubbing the exterior of her now slightly sore vent. She brought up her talons to her beak and idly lapped at the nectar drenching them. As she ate herself, she got down to thinking, staring at the pods while she did it.

_I wonder if the Purple Dragoness has experienced the same effect as I have. If this Fallen has poisoned her mind as well as mine._

In all likelihood?

Probably.

Cynder understood magical potency. One went for all. And if that human was walking around able to impact hens just by touching them….

That Purple Dragoness was probably ready to eat her own legs.

Cynder grinned as she finished licking her paws clean. She curled like a feline in the nest and draped her blood-red wings over herself.

This was supposed to be a war.

So then why did she feel so excited?

* * *

{🐉}


	15. Chapter 14 - The Temple and the Wing

**Dragon(s)layer**

**14**

* * *

**The Temple and the Wing**

* * *

Technically, this wasn't the first time a woman had slammed her ass in his face. But with the force of the blow, and the gradually developing black eye smearing his left side, it certainly felt like a fresh and painfully new experience.

He had an urge to tap a finger on the wound, but he couldn't even manage that.

The line of rope that the other dragons had tethered him up with didn't make moving in any kind of way an approachable option.

At least he could still wiggle his toes….

….But fuck all else.

They'd even taken all his nice new toys. A pile of Ape weapons, his empty pistol, their rations, and a handful of his regen-injections sat in a pathetic pile nearby as if to mock him.

"'Scuse me there, Sally," The Fallen croaked, slapping his tongue about his dry mouth. _Why couldn't one of those fleabags I shanked have dropped a canteen? _"but I have a really bad itch on the bridge of my nose right here."

"_Ha!_ Yeah, right, nice try, _alien._" Corrinthol laughed. "Nobody's falling for any stupid tricks like that."

"_That's its _nose_?_" Torrdonal gasped quietly under his breath.

"Maybe if we could at least reach a point where I'm not an _it_ but a _him._" The Fallen suggested with a defeated sigh, slumping against the rope.

"Not a chance." Corrinthol lowered himself and grinned wickedly at the Fallen. It seemed that no matter what expression the cocky fire dragon held, much less an antagonistic one, that he always broadcasted the words _shiteater. _He had a shiteating face and a shiteating grin.

Everything about him was a capital class douchebaggery alert on big, red legs with banners high and flying. The Fallen didn't even bother trying to take anything farther than it went with him. There was no point.

"It does sound masculine." Torrdonal said impartially, stepping up beside his more aggressive comrade to peer at the Fallen inquisitively. "Basic respects might be due where they're due, Corrinthol."

"I like this guy." The Fallen harrumphed. "I should have been talking to you from the getgo."

"You see what he's trying to do? He's trying to _manipulate you,_ Torrdonal!" Corrinthol swatted the water dragon upside one of his horns. Torrdonal clicked his tongue indignantly and stepped back with a paw on his head. "I've heard tales about people like him. At the academy, professor Cyrila always yapped about it. Cold-folk up in the mountains, _Apes,_ but with no hair! Apes that could reason and didn't answer to the Dark One over the Ancient Sea."

Corrinthol looked triumphantly down at the Fallen, whom, for his own part, was raising a brow at what he was hearing.

"He's from the tundra. He's got to be." Corrinthol smirked.

_Shiteater._

Torrdonal sat on his haunches and opened his mouth to say something. It was probably geared up to be a complaint about the unneeded swat of his headwear, but halfway through he paused, his eyes looking the human over.

"….I don't know." Torrdonal scrunched his chops in thought.

"Oh come on, look at him! That… _thing_ he's wearing on his skin? It's probably enchanted to deal with extremely cold temperatures."

It was the Fallen's turn to pause with the proverbial finger in the air. _Technically,_ the shiteating fire-breather wasn't wrong, the discussion he'd had with Spyra the other night came to mind.

He used to like to joke that his gear only lacked the pleasantries of a cupholder.

_Used_ to. Before the pods, and the crashing and… getting tied the hell up by a bunch of dickhead reptiles.

"Well that means he isn't with the Dark Army." Torrdonal didn't say this hopefully. He was a very impartial and neutral party in pretty much every discussion that happened around him, the Fallen had observed. "I thought one of the tenets of the Northern Military was advocating for the freedom of choice."

"Did you record that word for word?" The Fallen blinked.

"Silence, prisoner! And that only applies to other _dragons._" Corrinthol brushed it off. "Except _Night Dragons,_ they're exempt on account of betraying the first Guardians during the Ancestral Great War millennia ago. But I only know that because everyone at the academy never shut up about it."

"It sounds like you have everything figured out." The Fallen creased his lip. "You do exude a sort of tactical willyness about yourself… what was your name, _Corrinthol?_ I'm speaking plainly off my own opinion, but, sir,"

The Fallen's ropes creaked as he leaned as far as possible with the lowest voice he could manage.

"-_you could probably do your Captain's job a whole lot better._"

"….Uh, _Corrinthol?_" Torrdonal bit his chop.

This look was blooming over the fire dragon's face. And it was a look that made Torrdonal extremely nervous, and the Fallen extremely hopeful.

Corrinthol was _smiling._

"Could I now?" The flame dragon sat on his haunches, scooting closer to seat himself in front of the human. Torrdonal gasped when a slight hissing of scales against the cobblestone floor sounded out. Corrinthol's palm was to his shoulder and was very slowly, but deliberately, pushing the water dragon soldier away.

"What are you doing?" Torrdonal asked.

"Say, Torr', give me a minute with the prisoner, would you? It's rare that you find a fellow of similar taste, even if they're an alien." Corrinthol finished pushing and made a shooing motion with his paw.

"But, what about the prisoner potentially manipulatin-"

"Go play in water or something."

Torrdonal shivered and gave off a tiny panicked gasp. The water dragon rose to his feet and quickly padded off back inside the temple lobby, leaving Corrinthol and the Fallen alone.

"What's up with him?" The latter nodded.

"Figure a water dragon terrified of water." Corrinthol scoffed sourly. "He's been terrified of drowning since he was a baby. At least that's what he tells anyone who asks. Anyway, that's not important. I appreciate you seeing things in a greater scope. How it _really all works?_ You know I'm saying?"

The Fallen was smiling, but in his head he had already conjured a make-believe hammer and had murdered this dragon sixteen times with it. Headshots made things quicker, so he aimed for knees and elbows first.

Corrinthol was waiting for a response, confidence riddling and dripping from his grin like thick syrup.

_Shiteater._

"Of course I do." The Fallen nodded enthusiastically. "You were so fast when you expertly mounted that ambush tactic from the ceiling. I have military training too, you know, and as an offworld traveler, I've seen quite a lot."

"So you aren't from the tundra?" Corrinthol sat back, his tail curling.

"Unfortunately not." _No you stupid, ugly, inbred sack-a-shit. I'm going to find your family, decapitate your siblings, burn your crops, and find your mother before I bend her over and- _"-But where I can offer praise in your technique. Your execution of melee combat shows much promise and development. You have to tell me what this _academy_ back in Warfang is doing to produce such top example soldiers."

Corrinthol made a pleased- _"Ahhhh."_ –sound and settled in on his haunches for what would most likely prove to be a prolonged, and agonizing discussion.

"You have to know, I don't really try a whole lot, it's in my nature, to outperform." He explained. "I've always told myself that I have to hang back, especially with all the nice tail walking around. Being average on purpose raises morale. You're not letting the others down too much by making yourself applicable to their level, you know what I'm saying?"

"Oh, certainly." The Fallen scooted closer himself, straining the lines of rope. "I know we don't have any writing utensils out in the wilderness like this, but, you have to draw out for me your technique. How about on the dust right here, by my foot? Ancient ancestors won't care about some floor-doodling this late stage in the game, amIright?"

* * *

{🐉}

"Believe it or not, my journeys here were purely out of a concern many would call evanescent." Ignitia hummed, motioning with her snout to a little sash bag hanging from her hip. "To protect the records of the ancestors and the Old Guardians. Every time we canvas the site of the Dragon Temple we always recover some small piece of our own history. The Dark Army is rarely thorough in their razing, and so I have been leading the intermittent journeys to rebuild our own history piece by piece, as it is the only real option Malefora's occupation has left us with."

"…Yeah, that's real swell." Spyra looked around herself nervously, in particular, glancing back at Morinth. The black and silver dragoness who was to be her _escort._

A.k.a, the one with a wing open ready to snatch the purple beastess should she try to scamper away, like a disobedient gerbil.

Morinth smiled at her uncomfortably when she made eye contact. The dragoness reminded her a little bit of Cynder. She was darkly scaled, slender, had emerald eyes and similar-looking horns, even though there were fewer. Spyra never remembered being this self-conscious before about her own and other people's appearances.

But then again, her entire life had gone by up until now in the company of sentient insects small enough to fit in her palm.

There was a lot off about that, but it was unimportant in contrast to here and now.

She _had_ asked the sky for dragons. It had given her that and more.

"Are you well, Spyra?" Ignitia's matronly voice snapped her out of it. The flame dragoness was looking at her with a doting kind of expression. Frighteningly, and much to her guilt, _that_ reminded her not of Cynder, but of Cometcu.

_Mom._ Spyra didn't want to admit wishing she was here right now.

"I'm just a glamorous ray of fuckin' sunshine, lady." Spyra grumbled. Behind her, Morinth gave off a heavenly laugh.

"Cheeky that! I like her. She's got some moxy to what she has to say. Not enough women these days with that kind of outlook back home." Morinth winked at her. "Maybe once we get you acclimated, me and Tali' can show you the ropes."

"_Acclimated?_ What's she on about?" Spyra turned back to Ignitia, the larger female huffing as she came to a full stop in the center of the chamber.

"That is just one of so many questions I know you have." Ignitia gestured around the large chamber, one leading off from the lobby where the fighting had occurred. It was dome-shaped, with a roof made of cracked, but mostly intact amber glass that showed the sunlight through brilliantly. "But before I can answer all of them, I must ask you something; do you know where we are?"

A sad sigh from Morinth lowered the energy of her smile. She wandered a step from the interaction and gazed around the empty room dotingly. Spyra followed her eyes and tried to pick out a clue.

Old, curvy shelving units once lined the full length of the walls all around the chamber. Many had fallen down in sections and were gathering dust in pieces on the cobbled floor. A quad of dais plats centered the room with ancient-looking symbols engraved on their surfaces. The remains of a mural depicting a spheroid shape marred the northern wing's wall. The entire structure bled with draconic architecture.

"….If I answer wrong, like, what, are ya' gonna' slap me or something? Let's just establish the boundaries before I get into anything." Spyra raised a brow.

"Certainly not!" Ignitia had a lovely laugh. It was very lady-like. _Composed._ Spyra had a feeling she'd seen some shit. "Try to take a guess. I'll give you one, and then I will tell you."

"…A _ballroom?_" Spyra sniggered like a juvenile, pointing at the mural in the back. "Get it?"

Morinth chuckled dryly and fully sauntered away, stepping before one of the shelving units to seemingly bask in its presence, suddenly very thoughtful. Spyra switched her gaze between the two other dragons and shrugged her wings.

"Don't tell me it was a bread pantry or something."

"No." Ignitia smiled sadly. "It is not a ballroom or a pantry. Though with the latter, it is wholly similar. It _was_ wholly similar."

The Guardian sat on her haunches and curled her tail around her ankles, nodding gently for the floor in front of her, and patting it with the leaf-like splay of her tail's tip.

"Sit." She beamed, her expression bright and calm. "We have time before anyone chances a look at this place. I want to tell you a story."

"…Storytime? _Pfft,_ now?" Spyra jokingly grinned, looking back at the arch frame they'd walked through, and then at Morinth, who herself no longer looked amused, but somewhat concentrative. "Holy shit, you _are_ serious. Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but you have my friend lassoed to a pillar in the other room and have pretty much refused to let me leave since the lot of you ambushed us in the lobby. I'm sorry if your friends list is so small that you've turned to such aggressive tactics, but me and that alien have stuff to do."

"Would you have me leave, mam?" Morinth asked, ignoring Spyra's rant.

"I think the Purple Dragoness has proven herself a civil conversationalist when all misunderstandings are put aside." Ignitia smiled pleasantly and folded her wings. "If you would be so kind, Morinth. Also, do inform the Captain that we will be making return preparations soon, please."

"Yes, mam." Morinth smiled at Spyra and then walked out, her talons clicking on the cobble until that noise too left them completely.

"I realize that in keeping you here and binding your traveling companion, we might have come off as a bit… _forceful._" Ignitia cleared her throat. "But you must understand that we are locked currently in a time of war. Battles rage in the north, and they claim many lives. We must stick to caution before assumptions. Not thinking proactively can get people killed."

"Sure, I get that, being prepared, I've been exploring these swamps since I learned how to talk." Spyra edged a brow, seating herself a little farther from the Guardian than she had affectionately suggested earlier. "Hazards leave no room for error. But this is a little different. I'm gonna' take a wild guess and say you've got a decent clue about that crazy dyke with the runes branded on her ass who's trying to blow this place up. Me and the Fallen are on a quest to stop her and save my home. _You're_ interfering with that."

"Then perhaps we might start the conversation off with a bit of a compromise." Ignitia eagerly scooted a bit closer. Spyra didn't like how the older dragoness was looking at her. It looked like Ignitia was holding herself back from something, like she was desperate to… to _hug her_. "We both are risking very much for things very important to us. We both have friends and families, it seems, and we both are chancing fate by putting trust in others to keep them all safe. All I ask, is that you allow me to tell you something."

"Tell me what? What this stupid room was for?" Spyra rolled a paw around and huffed. "Lady, I can't even think about that right now with everything that's happening. Like, _ka-blamm~! _Complete mind-fuckery level stuff I'm talkin' about. I mean, I almost had an alien that I'm strangely sexually attracted to crush my face with an asteroid, _despite_ the fact that he kicked me into a mud ravine a few days ago. _Then_ a bunch of monkeys tried to skin me, and then I got showed up by _big-ass_ up in the Tower of Doom, and now I'm being held hostage by the first good-guy dragons I meet in some ancient, runic fuckhole."

Spyra might as well have not have spoken. Vulgarity and insults included, it all brushed right off Ignitia's face fins. She was still smiling warmly, like she was regarding a child, sitting on the floor, gradually getting closer and closer as to elicit physical contact.

Spyra's eye started to twitch. She immediately backflipped and went to curse the broad out. She was silenced with a startled grunt as Ignitia's tail wandered over and curled protectively around her flank.

"…And I was scared of the _Fallen_ molesting me…" Spyra pinched an eye shut and grit her fangs. "Back off, lady, you're giving me the creeps."

"_What? M-Molest- NO! No. Nononono… oh no, never… never anything like that to you…_" Ignitia held out her paws apologetically, but she inclined her snout and lowered them respectfully. "…I apologize. I have been living for a very long while under the assumption that you were dead. That the only egg I managed to save had not survived. To see you now? Well, _healthy,_ and so vibrant! It's… so overwhelming."

"_You? _It was _you?_" Spyra was upright, her tail lashing behind her as she gazed at Ignitia with huge, purple eyes. "What do you mean it was _you?_ We're talking about the same thing, right?"

"I placed your egg in the basket." Ignitia smiled, stifling a cry. "I was the one who floated you down the River of Amber. I was the one who tried in the only way I could to keep you safe."

"…Well, how long were you gonna' wait to drop _that_ fat one on my head?" Spyra plopped back onto her ass and blinked at the floor. A long while passed before she spoke again. This time, her expression was lofty, and she looked back up at Ignitia in wonder. "…._wait… so…?_"

"Yes, Spyra?" Ignitia couldn't scoot any closer now. Spyra's nose might as well have had a pair of cinnamon sticks shoved up each nostril.

The purple reptile quivered as she held out one of her paws, and quickly- perhaps _too_ quickly –Ignitia reached up and cupped it in her own, an expression of joy written on her face.

"…_T-That means…_" Spyra's lower chop quivered.

"Yes?"

"…._M-Mommy….?"_

_…._

_"WHAT?! Oh, no._ No. No that isn't- Oh, _shit-_" Ignitia stuffed a fist in her mouth and reclined backward, blushing at her own French. "…_Uhm, _Spyra, I… I think we lost each other, somewhere down the way… I…."

"..._yeeaaahhhhh_ this isn't horrendously awkward at all." Spyra slowly put her paw down and scratched at the back of her neck. "…You just made it sound_-…. I thought_-"

"_Goodness_ no." Ignitia giggled, cupping a paw over her snout as she rolled her eyes for the ceiling. "That's one question I cannot answer for you, unfortunately. I just _saved_ your egg, little hatchling, I did not _make it._"

"Alright, are we okay to just pretend that the last minute, y'know, didn't happen?"

"Of course, dear."

"_Right. _So… _woo! _Uhm…." Spyra coughed into her paw and paused, gesturing to the chamber around them again. "…so what's the bread pantry for?"

Ignitia hummed musingly, casting a glance around the room, as if she had forgotten it was all there.

"_This_ was the southern Egg Common Room for the frontier." The Guardian smiled. "Before the decline of the New Kingdom, hatchlings were considered especially sacred. Dragons had turned so much of their lives to the study of science, magic and lore, that more and more decades were passing without the conception of young. Mothers and fathers were older, and more spaced apart. To protect the eggs from the dangers of the swamps, they were sealed away here, and kept cool, and comfortable, to await the day of their hatching. I-"

Ignitia choked on her own words, still smiling, and forced herself to gain a semblance of composure yet again.

"_I _was one of those who was chosen for nursing capability here."

"…So this is where I was, as an egg." Spyra blinked at some of the toppled storage shelves nearby, their newfound meaning haunting her for her previous mockeries. "…How many others were there?"

"_Hundreds._ Maybe a thousand." Ignitia explained. "The exact number was recorded in script, but so many years later, its exact count eludes me. It was the first real sign of _hope_ for the development of civilization in the south, the _Untamed Frontier._ A new generation of dragons were destined to inherit this fresh land, where they could grow, become wise, and unearth its secrets and wonders."

"The dragons left afterward." Spyra said. "…But why? What happened to the eggs? What happened to _me?_ I don't understand, Ignitia."

"_Malefora_ happened." Ignitia lowered her head, burning holes in the floor. She realized her own appearance and quickly stomped it out, huffing and regaining the arch of her back. Her cheek-scales were turning bright red, Spyra realized it was becoming increasingly difficult for the flame dragoness to refrain from crying. "The temple was the most sacred site in the newly settled frontier. In an effort to stymie the growth of the Dragon Realms, Malefora preemptively struck against the fledgling southern settlements.

"Many assume Cynder is the one who unified the warring tribes of the Apes, but it is the Dark Mistress who ultimately first created the union of chieftains you currently see today. The tribes of Chieftains Visigoth, Jute, Saxony and Vandal, the fiercest of their kind. They predate even the Terror of the Skies as the first Ape Kings. They are the ones responsible for being the hammer that fell upon this land. Visigoth's armies, however, were the ones who besieged the temple that night. The night that I…"

Ignitia thumbed a tear from her eye. Another huff. Another hiding smile.

"Earlier, when I said I was chosen? It's not entirely true. I was the Guardian who volunteered to oversee the eggs. It was my job to tend to them every day. Fix their nesting, polish them, keep them warm through the use of dragonflame when night fell. I used to read to them too, _e-especially_ you. The one lone purple egg. I took special care of you always."

"That explains a lot." Spyra shuffled away uncomfortably when that red, luscious tail started to brush against her flank for the second time today. "Well, the parents had to come in to drop the eggs off, right? S-So my parents, _my real parents,_ had to have showed up at some point to drop me off! You didn't see them?"

"I did not encounter _most_ of the dragons who brought young to us. I was not the only caretaker here. Other nurses were on duty in rotations, along with temple guards and groundskeepers…" Ignitia shook her head. "_Anyway,_ I apologize, I'm straying. When we found the purple egg in the rest of the batch, we were dumbfounded, awestruck. Nobody could recall who had left you here, or even how. You just appeared one night, right over there, wedged behind a corner on that shelf."

Ignitia pointed a wingtip at one of the collapsed shelving lines in the rear of the chamber.

"But I didn't care where you came from. I vowed to see you through to becoming a hatchling. I wasn't about to let the first purple egg in such a long time go without a Guardian overseeing her. Without _me_ overseeing her." Ignitia said. "The other Guardians said it was best. They all came to see you. _Oh,_ so many came to see you, and you would be amazed at how terrified they all were to even risk touching or moving your egg. You were treated with reverence. Like you were made of the finest porcelain. None of the nurses would let anyone but me handle you."

"I guess I owe ya' one for that." Spyra cringed when Ignitia touched the side of her snout with her paw.

"Please understand," The Guardian sniffled. "I loved you like you were my own egg. You were so special. It wasn't just because of the _prophecies,_ those were piecemeal to me."

"Prophecies? What the- _No,_ no wait, don't tell me, _it was foretold!_" Spyra mimicked in mockery, wiggling her talons in the air.

"It was!"

"_Knew it._"

"You were the first Purple Dragoness in over a hundred years. It has been said throughout the realms, in more annals and tomes than I could ever record, that the savior of the world as we know it, is _you._" Ignitia rested a palm over Spyra's heart. "It is a Purple Dragon who is supposed to banish darkness forever and defeat the Dark One. Restore order to all _Mana_ and all _dragonflame._ For so long, we thought our last hope had perished, and yet here you stand before me, right where it all started."

Spyra at least managed a legitimate smile, and it broke Ignitia's resolve. The Guardian made a happy cooing sound and surged forwards all at once, as a big, red, finned and cinnamon-smelling mass. Spyra's eyes bugged as she was squeezed like a squeaky toy to Ignitia's breast.

"I'm sorry!" Ignitia giggled when she started to struggle, and released her. "I am normally not this clingy, I'm just so happy that you came back to me! On such short notice and coincidence too. If you had arrived but an hour or so later, me and Captain Harad's Wing would've departed for the North."

"Yeahyeahyeah, I'm known for my _speed,_ it matches my finesse. You can ask the alien." Spyra stuck her tongue out teasingly. "_Speaking of…"_

"_Alien?_ Do you mean that creature?" Ignitia pointed a talon at the arch frame behind them. "The one with pale skin that attacked the Captain?"

"Hey! Him and his dickhead space-cadets are the ones who attacked first!" Spyra defended. "Me and the Fallen were coming here for answers anyway, to see if we could determine who had floated me down the amber river before we went after Cynder. It was just to look for clues about Warfang." Spyra nodded at her. "Guess we found a whole lotta' clues."

"And this _Fallen,_ what is he?"

"Hu-man, _hooman? _You know what I mean." Spyra waved a paw. "_Though,_ ya' kinda' don't. He's a _human,_ he says. He fell out of the sky in a flaming rock of doom and nearly knocked me and Cynder's block off. He took out a whole cave of Mana Crystals that the Apes were digging up. _Kablooosh~!_" She demonstrated the explosion with a preen of her wings. "_Huuuuge explosion! _It was awesome!"

"You've already met _Cynder?_ She found you, and you survived?" Ignitia gaped.

"I couldn't have done it without him." Spyra nodded. "He's the one who got me out of the blast crater after Cynder wounded me. He healed me too! With this weird poky-thing that he stuck in my arm… Made all the damage go away. It was kinda' creepy, but I wasn't complaining. He can fight too. Like, _really fight._ He took out a whole cadre of dudes when Cynder chased us back down by the river corpse and tried to rip our heads off, but that was _after_ I got attacked by Chieftain Visigoth, and I smashed his ugly teeth out of his fat head and char-broiled his ass."

"_V-Visigoth? You battled Visi-_"

"-Hell yeah I did! Guy was a pussy. Didn't have a fighting bone in his body methinks. I span circles around him like it was no tomorrow, bled him good too! He said he was going to skin me alive or something, but I was like _pffft~! _Bitch, get in line." Spyra let it all roll off her tongue like it was yesterday's gossip. With each tumbling sentence, Ignitia's face twisted into more and more extreme poses of horrified stupor. "After that, the Fallen stabbed ole' Cyndie-Tootles in the boob and sent her packing. He does this _thing_ to dragonesses when he touches them, I personally can't get enough of it-"

"_What._" Ignitia leaned very close now, her nostrils flaring as she tested Spyra's scent. "He _touched you?_ He did something to you? Explain yourself this instant."

"…I-It's not a big deal… Me and him are bros. _Well,_ dude and dudette. He's awesome! He's got moves I've never even seen before. He's strong, and he's fast, and he roughhouses just the way I like to, and he's fast, and he's strong and-"

Spyra didn't seem to notice as she continued to snowball her reverie. Ignitia was examining her from top to bottom. Pinching her wings open, peering at the shoulders, turning her head (while she was still obliviously babbling about the human's salty skin-smell) and checking behind her horns.

"Spyra. _Spyra._" Ignitia shook her a little bit until she stopped talking. "What did this _Fallen_ character _do to you?_ Did he use magic? Was it an enchantment? If he's hurt my-_ Imean! –our_ Purple Dragoness, than action must be taken."

"He didn't hurt me or use magic or anything like that. He helped me! And he can help you too."

"How?"

"Me and him are gonna' find where Cynder's fortress is, and we're gonna' walk in and kick her ass back to wherever she came from." Spyra stated. Ignitia's jaw dropped.

"_WHAT-?!_" The Guardian shrieked.

**_C-shhhhh…. C-shhhhh…. C-shhhhh…._**

-Both dragons turned to the archway of the egg chamber to the sound of something being dragged against the cobbled floor. Someone was making a series of horrid gagging sounds too. It was as if the subject in question was retching. Spyra was reminded of her brother before she had been sucked up into this whole fiasco.

A moment later, and the Fallen stepped into the chamber. He had a line of rope wrapped around his fist and forearm, yanking it occasionally as he dragged dead-weight tied-up behind him. A forceful jolt of his wrist, and Corrinthol made another choking wheeze as he was dragged unceremoniously out from the hallway outside via a _leash_, the rope that he and Harad had tied the Fallen up in was secured firmly around his throat like a cattle's guide.

_Too tightly,_ of course. The human's smile was forced through an expression of grave piss-offed-ness.

But also, he appeared very wild.

It was the same expression he'd held when he was slaughtering Cynder's Apes.

"Took you long enough." Spyra chortled. Ignitia gasped.

"I was just walking the hallways of this fine establishment, and happened to overhear a subject pertaining to yours truly." The Fallen brushed a hand over his chest. "Evidently, dragons don't know how to tie a good knot, or assign appropriate sentries to watch their prisoners. You people should be ashamed of yourselves."

"_Ha~!_" Spyra stuffed her paws over her snout to stifle the laughter. And the blush. "You're so fucking cool."

"_Release him immediately._" Ignitia dropped her motherly outlook in a heartbeat. She was up, and her paws were spaced on either side of her in a prepared combat pose, her mighty, umber wings spread threateningly, her nostrils pluming soot, her fangs bared.

"Who? _Oh! _You wouldn't happen to be talking about Chokesalot here, would you?" The Fallen yanked the rope and made Corrinthol echo around the chamber with a pained- '_Acchhhhhhh~!' _–escaping his chops. Spittle flew everywhere, and shockingly, his already red scaly face was turning impossibly redder. He twisted and writhed on the ground, clawing at the rope tethering off his throat, his wings flapping incessantly. "That's my new name for him. It's very fitting, I believe. You all should count yourselves lucky. Dime-a-dozen dicksuckers like this bottomfeeder are rife no matter where I go, and I rarely treat stuff in no short supply with any kind of tenderness. You look like you're about to bust a gasket over it. Tell you what? You let my purple girlie and future breeding-sleeve there go, and we'll talk negotiations about the crimson-fucker with the chip in his shoulder."

"I don't want to sound like the bad guy here, but the Fallen's serious when he makes a threat. I've seen it! He goes _rahhh!, _and, _wahhhh!,_ and he kicks people in the can and-" Spyra paused, gears turning so hard in her head that smoke started to form. "…._waitasecond._ What the fuck did you call me?" She turned back to the Fallen with fire in her eyes.

"I am Wingleader Ignitia of the City and Realm of Warfang, Elemental Guardian of Flame." Ignitia said domineeringly. She stepped around Spyra and placed herself between her and the human. "This Purple Dragon is now _my_ responsibility, and under the jurisdiction of the Dragon Council and convene of Guardians overall. Your services up until this point are appreciated, but are no longer necessary. Leave the temple immediately, and Captain Harad's warriors will give no further chase to you."

"…Captain Harad's _warriors_." The Fallen creased a lip, bundling the rope in his fingers, he glanced back at Corrinthol, whose eyes were bugging out as he yanked fruitlessly on the line, nudged back by the Fallen's foot every time he crawled closer to claw and swipe at his legs. "You're placing a lot of stock in something that is pure and unadulterated shit, madame. I hardly believe this gentleman could claw his way out of an unsealed paper bag much less a dedicated fight. With all due respect; I've encountered specimens of the elderly that had more punch wielding tennis-balled walkers and catheters. Oh, and Mormons scorned. I don't think you appreciate how much it took for me to say that."

"I do not negotiate with enemies of the state. Conform or be destroyed." Ignitia stepped closer, parting her fangs. Broiling, flickering fire brewed in the back of her throat and illuminated the interior of her maw. When she spoke again, her words sounded like they were breaths from raw brimstone. "-And personally? _I will be dead before I let you lay a finger on this dragon again._"

"You dare stand between me and my durg-booty?" The Fallen ground his teeth. "If it's a fight you're itching for…"

"_STOP!_" Spyra flapped her wings and landed between the two of them. "How much more dialogue needs to droll on before you two get that we're on the same frikken' side?!"

"It's come to war! That's alright, I am quite used to the natives trying to spear me in the face." The Fallen cast aside Corrinthol's leash and whipped out one of the blades he'd looted from a dead Ape. He twirled it so that the metal glinted in the dull amber hue from above, leaning back in preparation to leap. As he smiled, a heavy perfume grazed his nose. The Fallen shuddered and his eyes wildly darted between Ignitia and Spyra. "…_But I'll admit,_ the withdrawal I suffer from doesn't leave many of said natives in a good position for a certain kind of _mercy._"

"Stand aside, Spyra. I shall protect you. I will _not_ lose you again! Not this time!" Ignitia roared.

"But I don't _need_ protecting! And I don't need another war waged for me!" Spyra snapped at both of them in turn, causing the Fallen to blink and lower his blade slightly. "The Fallen is my friend! He's the first and only friend I've ever had! I don't care if it's only been a few days, he's important! And I feel like he's important to this _prophecy_ all of you are getting on about as well!"

"I understand that you think you're doing the right thing, but Spyra, this creature has manipulated you!" Ignitia cried. "Now get out of the way. I have a job to do, one I will not fail in again!"

"_Pity,_ I would've loved a red scale to add to the poon-wall." The Fallen growled.

Just then, Corrinthol reared up behind the Fallen, the leash still tethered around his neck. His eyes were wild as he heaved back a claw, aiming to swipe and slash open the human's jugular.

"-_Y-You triched meeh-!_" The flame dragon slurred around the rope.

The Fallen clicked his tongue, forgetting all about Ignitia. He promptly turned around and punched Corrinthol in the throat.

"-_Accckkhhhh~!_" –Corrinthol hacked, tumbling like a sack of bricks.

"Stay down already, would you?" The human winced, wagging his sore hand.

"_Pfffffffftt-hahaaahaaaaa~!_" Spyra started to laugh so hard that she was screaming. Mimicking Corrinthol, the purple reptile flailed onto her back and started to cackle her scales off, pointing at the miserable flame dragon across the room. "-_D-Did you hear the noise he made-?!_"

Against everyone's expectations, Ignitia herself gave off a tiny crackling noise, and a few cinders flecked from her teeth as the fire in her mouth died down.

It had been a _snicker._

Before anyone knew it, her and Spyra were both laughing, and the ruckus filled the whole chamber.

Rubbing his knuckles, the Fallen sighed and sheathed his blade as the situation literally diffused itself. He glanced down at Corrinthol and grinned as the poor soldier struggled to get the leash off his neck.

"Looks like you're an unfortunate incident we like to call common ground_._" The Fallen chuckled. "Alright, Miss Ignitia, I'm willing to let the whole being-tied-to-a-pillar thing go if you are. I feel like I missed a whole conversation. Somebody get this guy a throat lozenge, and fill me in."

* * *

{🐉}

"…Corrinthol? I'm back. I had a little walk and I was thinking about what you said earlier. I'm not really appreciative of the way you talk to me, and I think I want a little bit more respect when you-…"

Torrdonal stopped dead in his tracks as he returned to the lobby gallery of the temple.

The Fallen, Corrinthol, and the tether of rope they'd appropriated from the rubble, were all gone.

Torrdonal wheezed in panic, blubbered something unintelligible, and sprinted to find the Captain.

* * *

{🐉}

"Ancestor's cocks, what do you mean the prisoner escaped?" Harad cried.

Torrdonal probably had rehearsed an explanation in the minute or so it took to find his CO, but all that came out between labored breaths were a few words like- '_tricked!' –_and- '_Corrinthol!'_ –and- '_Water!'_ –before Harad huffed and silenced him with a wave of his green, daggered talons.

"Get a hold of yourself." He sneered down at the smaller water drake in disgust, before turning his gaze over his mighty wings to the other side of the little prayer chamber. "Morinth, Taliopia? You'll search the old egg chamber and the scribe vault, me and Torrdonal are going to check the gardens and the observer's platform."

"I told you not to leave Corrinthol as a guard." Morinth sighed, fawning over Taliopia's wing as the two dragonesses sat curled up next to and against one another in the back of the room. She used her fangs to clean the boney joints between the rose-colored membranes of the white dragon's beautiful wings. Taliopia giggled and kicked at Morinth playfully with her feet. Morinth stopped grooming her for a second to gaze lazily at her Captain. "Cheeky that the little hoopla and bugger at the market last month wasn't example enough that that male's perception could be outdone by the dead. If you want my advice, I say we let the alien have him! _Aaaannnddd maaybbbeeee, Corrinthol will gettttttt…. Eaten~._"

Taliopia giggled more and rolled on the floor playfully, the little healing potion vials hanging from her hip-sash jingling like a small array of ornamental bells.

"She's got a point, sir." Torrdonal gasped. Harad gawked at him like he was a moron. "What if the alien's a meat-eater like us? And he likes the taste of dragon?"

"That alien _scares me…_" Taliopia shuddered at the memory, crooning when Morinth hummed supportively and lapped at one of her horns.

"Luckily for you, your big strong _Morri-poo_ is here to keep you safe and _lovvveeeelllyyyyy, my deaarrrr~._" The darker dragoness sang.

"This is borderline insubordination, but my patience is thin, and I don't think pursuing it will get any of us anywhere." Harad growled, whipping his mace-head tail for an archway nearby. "Morinth and Taliopia, I just gave you an order. March."

"_Yessir._" Morinth sprang up and dragged Taliopia with her, ignoring the medic's panicked mewls as she carted them both to their duty. "Let's go be patriots for the homeland, sweety."

"B-But being a patriot brings the risk of being a _martyr._" Taliopia gasped. "You have to be _dead_ to be one of those!"

"As opposed to alive and a _heroinneee~!_" Morinth cheered, her black wings flapping as she took a dancing hop in her step. "How exciting! Cheeky too. I wonder what kind of medal they would award a warrior of Warfang for killing an _alien?_ Maybe, it'll be shaped like a saucer or something."

"Or maybe we'll get whisked away because our government lies to us…" Taliopia shivered in terror. "Morinth, please don't make me go! I don't want to fight! Harad's mean, and he hates me because I got dumped in this unit. E-Ever since Tall Plains…"

"Screw Tall Plains, Tali'." Morinth clicked her tongue as they walked. Taliopia gasped.

"_Morinth, _language…"

"Past mistakes don't define the dragoness. If we were all bound by what we have done, there'd be no one left." Morinth waved a paw dismissively as they crossed another lobby hall, passing unlit braziers and hanging chandeliers made from amber crystal. Mushrooms overgrew much of the floor along with moss clumps and piles of rubble from walls that had failed. "Trust me when I say that the past is exactly like hatchling school. Get a good look at my chops; _nobody cares._"

"I-I know…" Taliopia kicked a chunk of debris in thought. "It's just… what happened was so embarrassing. _Everything_ really has been embarrassing. I wasn't meant for the military. I'm only here because of mom and dad. '_Our wealth denotes a higher standard'._" She quoted her own mother, before they had sent her off packing in the draft. "….I miss my mommy, Morri-poo. I never got to introduce them to you! They would _love_ you! A-At least I think… I hope."

"Other dragons might struggle with us." Morinth kindly minimized as they peaked into several passing chambers. "But nobody ever said that what comes best comes easy. Step into life with a jolt and jump, I've always thought of it as. Not liking _drakes_ isn't a wrong sort of mind frame…"

A moment of silence permeated the patrol. Taliopia nudged closer and nuzzled Morinth's cheek.

"Morinth?"

"Yes?"

"Is it wrong that I…_ we…._ _like other females?_ More than males I mean."

"Not even a teensy-tiny bit." Morinth laughed. "Society's a big ole' stickler. Conformity's nice, but sometimes it's just a stressful and unneeded shackle others like to put on everyone around them. Dragons aren't comfortable unless things are black and white." She gestured to her and Tali' for emphasis. "And are we so wrong? Besides, that doesn't just go for home. Cheeky, because I've witnessed it everywhere I've gone. But people can change. All they _neeeed is the righ-high-ighhtttt sonnnngg~!_"

Morinth had a wonderful singing voice. Taliopia had spent many a night lauding and telling her that she should've pursued a career in performing arts when the war was over. _If_ the war ever ended.

Morinth had been in the army for _way_ longer than her. She'd needed it to- '_Get her life in order' _–according to her. Time and time again, though, Taliopia wondered exactly what that meant. The Morinth she knew had her priorities straight and always had a chipper attitude even when things were in the proverbial toilet.

According to Morinth, she hadn't always been the same 'ness. Taliopia couldn't picture her any different or less, and so she struggled with understanding her plight.

But a lot of that came from being _half_ Night Dragon. Morinth's mother had been ostracized when she came back from the war, not only a widow, but bearing an egg that had the unmistakable dark tint of a _Night Dragon'_s heritage. Morinth had never known her father, and had essentially grown up as a gutter-lizard in twisting ducts and streets of the capital megacity of Warfang.

_Get through the tough to see the great! _Morinth told Taliopia when she'd questioned her hatchlinghood. The pain in her emerald eyes spoke legions of everything darker she refused to voice aloud. Morinth had had a hard life. The military and its rigid structure had only seemed natural.

Now, take the homebody and timid little hen that was _Taliopia,_ and add that in to the fact that they were scissoring when the urge overtook them, and you had a pair that pretty much every angle of society had a problem with.

But as Morinth had sang one evening:

"_Fuuuu-uuu-hu-huccckkk themmmm~!_"

So here they were, even in the army.

Taliopia wished the draft had never happened. But so many dragons were dying, that the survival of their very race was being brought into question. There were few able bodied males and females within the allotted age group who weren't being at least groomed by recruiters for service.

"Is it true that ancient dragons used to live here?" Taliopia gazed at one of the hauntingly still-lit gem-chandeliers over their horned heads.

"Dragons settled the swamps ages ago, but they were kicked out within memory of a lot of our parents, older siblings and grandparents." Morinth sadly smiled. "That's where I'm hearing that little feisty purple lady we picked up earlier came from. The Purple Dragoness? Can you believe it, Tali'? We might have found a prophesized champion!"

"_Prophesized?_ But I thought all those stories weren't real." Taliopia gasped. "They couldn't be real! I-I mean… what about… what about the _Dark Mistress?_"

"Shush. Don't say that so loud." Morinth shivered. "What about her? She's the baddest doody-head of them all."

"Wasn't she supposed to be the first-"

"-_Acchhhkkkkkk~!_" –Echoed from down a nearby hall.

Both dragonesses froze, and then looked at each other. Morinth was smiling, and Taliopia was quivering in terror.

"_C'mon~!_" Morinth hissed excitedly.

"_-Eep~!_" –Taliopia squeaked as she was dragged along.

The pair bounded down a few twists and turns, hearing the echoing voices of several people. The matronly drone of Wingleader Ignitia, the flame Guardian of the Dragon Council. The boisterous potty-mouth that was Spyra. The masculine drawl that was the alien, and the grunts of Corrinthol, the latter of whom were very pained.

"_Lady Ignitia, we have come to saavvvveee youuuu~!_" Morinth sang as she threw Taliopia into the doorway of the egg chamber first and tumbled in after her.

"-_Morrrrinntthhh~!_" Taliopia howled before scrabbling over her own heels and losing her balance. The two dragonesses tumbled like a yin-yang sphere into the chamber and collapsed into a combined heap on one of the inscriptured dais plats.

"Morinth? Taliopia? Are you alright?" Ignitia gasped from nearby.

"Don't fret, mam, we're still battle-worthy." Morinth chirped, her head poking out from between a tangle of her and Taliopia's bodies. She surveyed the room and locked eyes with the human, the _Fallen. _"_You!_ Escaped from your binds, have you, demon? _Have at ye~!_"

"_Ouuuchhh~! Morri-poo! That's my footy-wooty you're stepping on!_" Taliopia whined.

"Tali'! Maybe your _footy-wooty_ shouldn't be in my _freaky-peepy way-ie~!_"

"The fuck do you two talk like retards for?" Spyra snapped.

Morinth growled as she helped Taliopia to her feet. The poor medic was shell-shocked, and could barely handle the rapid barrage of vulgarity that had spewed like an open sewer grate from Spyra's muzzle in such short effect.

"While that is very _very_ insulting, my professionalism bids me to forget it was said." Morinth glumly blinked at Spyra, disappointed as she dusted Taliopia's wings with her own. "Cheeky that; technically you're still a _civilian_ in the eyes of the army, and my job says I have to help you along like a clueless gerbil."

"These horns were made for buckin', lady, and they buzz when people piss me off." Spyra growled, turning her attention from where she stood beside the Fallen. "Feels like someone's stuck a vibrator in my ear canal right about now."

"_Oh my!_" Taliopia gasped, part in reaction to the foul language and part for seeing the Fallen.

The human- for his part –smiled warmly and stepped past Spyra, before kneeling before the two dragonesses, reaching down, and taking Taliopia's white, dainty paw.

"Do excuse my friend's rather brash greeting, I'm _honored_ to be in the company of so many fine draconic females such as yourselves." He placed a light kiss on Taliopia's wrist. The medic froze up like an icicle, and she fluttered her eyes rapidly, a heavy flush flooding her snout. "And sorry about the misunderstanding earlier. I am at your service now, my lovely lady. Your name is Taliopia? A beautiful name indeed."

Taliopia shivered uncontrollably, her pink eyes locked on the human like he was the only thing seeable in an entire universe of blank whiteness. Something bloomed in the back of the medic's vision, a nebula of emotions.

Morinth looked on, horrified.

"-_B-Beautifulllll….?_" Taliopia slurred, her body wavering, and her previously erratic tail standing bolt straight behind her.

"Yes, quite so. _Shapely,_ if you do not mind my eagerness." He winked at her. "You'd make a drake _very_ happy with your company, doubtless. You're not… _on the market,_ per-say, are you?"

Taliopia creamed her tail and passed out on the floor.

Morinth squealed in fright and hung over her in terror.

"_Tali'? Tali'?! What the fuck did you do to her?!_"

"I wonder that question myself." Ignitia stepped forwards, keeping her distance as the Fallen spun around and gazed at her with a pleasant grin, as if nothing had just happened. "Your touch elicits quite the interesting results, _Fallen._ Is there something you are not telling us about?"

"You traded your stories, I traded mine." The Fallen shook his head. "At least now we know where Spyra comes from, and we know where we have to go."

Nearby, Corrinthol was getting up, tenderly slipping the leash off his throat. He glumly slapped his chops and whined like a bitch in heat at the tenderness in his neck. He saw Taliopia on the floor and gawked outside the exchange.

"…_You… You _swooned_ her?_" He went slack-jawed. "B-But I've tried that before! I- I thought she was a _lesbian!_"

"Stow it over there, little red whore-nugget, or I shall return and dominate you like the squealing piglet you are." The Fallen growled. Corrinthol went wide-eyed like he'd seen a ghost, and promptly shut his mouth. "…Now, you were just about to chew me out for trying to bring Spyra to Cynder's tower?"

"Indeed!" Ignitia stomped her foot. "What madness has come over you, that you saw it tactically wise to not avoid the Dark Army's occupying forces here, but drive for their _headquarters?_ With the Purple Dragoness in tow, no less! Do you realize that she is our only hope? She has no military training! She has not seen live battle yet."

"Not really true." Spyra grinned. "He may kill most of 'em, but I've been racking up a pretty sweet monkey-kill-counter myself."

Ignitia looked like she was ready to scream.

Would the offenses never end?

"Hey, sorry about your friend there, I didn't mean to come on too strong, it's just that I have an inability to not pursue a beautiful dragoness when I see one." The Fallen swept over to Morinth in an instant. The poor hybrid dragon sucked up her own chops and reared her neck back in gall as her personal space was invaded. The Fallen reached out, and cupped the underside of her chin, caressing down her elegant snout. "And _you_ are possibly one of the greatest ebony wonders I've yet to witness strut down a broken, mushroom-filled and ancient temple. If I win the war for you, would you be willing to let me, as your savior, _perhaps…_ liberate you of your lonely evenings, and sample your reptilian treasures with my man-spear?"

**_Fwoooofff~!_**

-Morinth's wings preened as wide as they could. The blush was indescribable.

Spyra gnawed on her own tail in fury.

* * *

{🐉}


	16. Chapter 15 - Tastes like Purple

**Dragon(s)layer**

**15**

* * *

**Tastes like Purple**

* * *

The temple looked smaller from the outside, as time and reclamation by nature had assured that most of its treasures had remained hidden.

After initial (albeit violent) greetings, Ignitia was quick to guide Spyra through as many steps of the past as time would allow, the Fallen trailing always not far behind, and likewise _always_ under the watch of the distrustful Captain.

Harad hadn't been pleased at all to witness one of his soldiers- even one as _unique_ as Corrinthol –bested twice in a row by the mysteriously appearing human.

"What ridiculousness." He had chided. "You're telling me that _thing_ fell out of the sky? There's nothing up there but clouds. Dragons have flown the highest they can, and we've determined where the world ends. I can't believe that this Fallen has simply appeared, with the obvious and very dangerous skills he has acquired, and that that is our answer. It's madness! What if he is in league with the enemy?"

"Where do you think I got all my new toys from? The Apes obviously had a donation bin set up in the swamps, I know." The Fallen grinned. "We're wasting time."

"The Fallen's right! He's here now and he's the best we got." Spyra smirked. "What we really need to figure out is; how do we drive out Cynder and her Ape army from a position they've been fortifying for years, and do so quickly?"

Harad had laughed bitterly.

"Wingleader Ignitia, you cannot seriously be considering these ideas, ones born from a _child,_ and a trained killer who has manipulated her." Harad snorted. "The human should be restrained, and both forcibly removed to Warfang's dungeons for the consideration of the Dragon Council. Our laws demand it!"

"I fear that even if I resigned to attempting such a thing, that our _guest_ would prove beyond your capabilities to simply subdue, Captain." Ignitia glanced tiredly at the Fallen.

"See that? It's always the women who are smarter." The Fallen elbowed Morinth, making her blush. "The only thing more valuable than fresh poon is _battlefield intelligence._ For our little situation here, it's pure gold. If what you all describe is true, then the Dark Army is headquartered in a heavily defended, prepared position."

"It is the Forlorn Watch." Ignitia sighed. "The ancient tower first erected by settlers passing from Stormwatch over the Frontier Sea. It commands a complete view over the Forbidden Funguswood and the surrounding landscape. When loyalist forces still consistently scouted the swamps, they reported that the Apes had set up a war factory inside the old tower's guts. It is from there that Cynder reinforces, stages and equips her Ape legions."

"You people stopped scouting?" The Fallen asked. "This war cannot be going as badly as that makes it sound. Without a pathfinding corps, how would you be able to tell the movements along several fronts?"

"Manpower demanded soldiers be drawn to Daragon and the woodlands ringing the Valley of Avalar." Harad snorted. "The swamps had long been lost to the Dark Army. Sending scouts in was considered suicidal. Even these trips that Wingleader Ignitia has bravely mounted to recollect the Dragon Temple's records, have been forced and extremely dangerous. This is the most men we've been able to slip in at one time in months."

"And now Malefora has initiated another invasion of the Daragon Coast." Ignitia shook her head. "Grublin and Orc armies are sailing across the Ancient Sea and besieging the Realm of Vines. Queen Lillith is our only hold there, and I've heard from the officer ranks that Oversight is preparing to fall. The siege has turned into a bloodbath. A few weeks ago, my great friends, and the Guardians of Electricity and Ice, Volteera and Cyrila journeyed to help the defenders in their cause. I have heard no word from them as to what has transpired."

"These things require the strength of _stone._" Harad boasted, holding out his claw, where a small, glowing green orb of rock materialized in his palm and spiraled for their consideration. "The great Guardian of Earth, Terradora, should have been the one to pass into Daragon. Instead, the Council deemed it fit to waste her in that ill-gotten assault upon Monkano…"

"Time out." The Fallen held his brow. "How many strongpoints does the Dark Army currently have?"

"Monkano Island has turned into a forge and warfactory for the Apes. We do not know the warlord's name who Malefora has given fealty over that place. We do know that they supply Cynder's army with the majority of their weapons and armor.

"The Forlorn Watch is the youngest of the dark fortresses to arise. Cynder has been amplifying her master's occupation over the whole southern landmass through this place, but aside from a garrison, we haven't a firm idea as to what else the Dark One is using Forlorn for." Ignitia explained.

"Mana Crystals." The Fallen stated.

"That was quick." Harad edged a brow. "How do you know this information? The swamps have been drained of magic and enchantments for years."

"Maybe on the surface. But me and Spyra determined early on that the Apes aren't here for the swamps, they're here for the cavern networks underneath it." The Fallen said. "These caves and methane cavities are apparently stocked full of Mana Crystals, which the Apes have been carting back to the Forlorn Watch in droves, no doubt to manufacture more of these creatures you've spoken of, Grublins? Orcs? Ugly horrors born from the earth? Here's how Malefora is doing it. Taking out Forlorn limits her ability to deploy troop strength in the rest of the fronts."

"Then there's Concurrent Skies, a mass of crystalline snow islands levitating in an eternal magical storm known as the Blue Hurricane. Cynder's castle resides there, and the islands have remained a staging ground for decades even before she arrived." Ignitia gestured with her tail to the center of the chamber they all stood in.

Overlooking the convene was the largest dragon statue in the temple. It was easily several stories high, curled regally, with its horns reaching for the amber dome above. This room had once been the temple's elemental training room. It was a little cramped, but it fit the needs as a warroom.

A map of the known world had been laid out on the floor. The Fallen had been considering it painstakingly throughout the entire discussion, refusing to part his eyes from it.

"You're tellin' me this bitch has been running Forlorn like a _vacation house?_" Spyra gawked. "She's got an even _bigger_ fortress? That's stupid! Not fair at all."

"Lastly," Ignitia poked her tailtip into a large, blackly shaded landmass north of the swamps, over two oceans, running parallel to the Dragon Realms over the Ancient Sea. "there is the Dark Continent. Malefora's volcano and her palace reside there. That is the center of evil. The Dark Army was born there, when Malefora fled from the first Guardians after her failed training."

"_Training._" Spyra blinked. "At Warfang? Why would you train your greatest enemy? What was she trained in?"

"Elements, combat technique and the like. I was a hatchling long after Malefora had betrayed us all and plunged the world into this war, all in her bid to dominate sentient life." Ignitia sadly recalled.

"You haven't connected the dots?" The Fallen tore his eyes from the map and looked at Spyra for the first time in the whole discussion. The room was silent, even for Harad, who begrudgingly found himself mute in the face of it all.

"No." Spyra mumbled. "Can't someone just tell me?"

"She was-"

"-the first Purple Dragoness." The Fallen cut Ignitia off. "That much is clear now. I think it also says a lot about why Mr. Harad here is so constipated about what you have to say."

"The belief of a second corrupted purple dragon, is real, but aloof." Ignitia quickly stepped in again before Harad could start shouting. "That is why Spyra's egg was kept here, far away in the south, to prevent Malefora from corrupting her to her side through the use of magic, like she did to Cynder…"

"…_Oh yes, that jiggly piece of booty, how could I forg-_" The Fallen noticed the stares, and cleared his throat. "-_Ahem,_ I mean, that terrible fell creature of darkness. Indeed. Where'd she pop out from?"

"The same clutch of eggs as Spyra." Harad nodded angrily at the purple dragon. "Because that clutch was cursed from the first conception! Corruption ran through its veins even before the axe fell. The south should have been abandoned in the prior age."

"Captain, I must kindly order you to shut your mouth." Ignitia gave another of her pleasant smiles, like she had asked Harad the condition of the weather. "Spyra is _not_ like Cynder, and she is most certainly not like Malefora. She is uncorrupted, _pure?_ Perhaps not, given the rather broad and barbaric vocabulary she has developed… but uncorrupted, none the less."

"Guilty as charged there." Spyra snickered. "It's all about the wrist movements, that's where the shit happens."

"You folks are in one heck of a stink." The Fallen knelt before the map and ran his fingers over the Dark Continent, smiling in deep thought. "…But I don't see this as unwinnable. _Yet._ You are running out of time, that I'm not going to lie to you about. And I think I have an idea."

The human looked at Ignitia.

"From this moment forth, I pledge my service to the City and Realm of Warfang, _on condition,_ that we break the occupation of the swamp, and protect Spyra's home, keep her adoptive family safe from the Apes." He gestured to Spyra. "If you all can guarantee me that… Then yes, I will fight for you. I'll win your war for you."

"_Ha!_" Harad mocked. "One little simian who fell from the sky? Breaking a war that has been raging across the surface of the world for the last few centuries? One that's burned through tens of thousands of souls? You're a joke, or a fool, or perhaps both. Needless to say, you are wasting both of our times. Wingleader Ignitia, we must discuss _long term _strategy."

"You're free to reject my help. However, I almost rejected Spyra's help myself." The Fallen stood up and crossed his arms. "I've come to learn how much of a mistake that ultimately would've become. Without her being my guide, we would've never reached the Dragon Temple before Ignitia and your squad departed. I would've been bogged down by Apes, but Spyra knew all the shortcuts and hidden paths. My point being; don't make a quick decision you'll later regret. I'm asking you to reconsider."

"That's a touching argument." Harad pawed the map, and scrunched it back up until it was rolled and compact. He handed it to Ignitia, before trotting for the chamber exit. "But we have a realm to defend, and you are not part of it. Your understanding of warfare has so far proven inadequate and shockingly unprofessional. We're done speaking, _human._ Corrinthol, Torrdonal, get ready, we're leaving."

"I've given no such order, Captain." Ignitia reminded. Harad ignored her, and soon had vanished into the halls beyond. "It pains me to see such hard-headedness in charge of our youth…"

"Dickhead." Spyra spat in the direction of the archway and sat next to the Fallen. "You okay there, big guy?"

"_Nobody calls me incompetent._" The Fallen sneered. "I'm about to open up a can of whoop-ass that infidels like him shan't soon forget. You all want a plan? I've got a plan…"

"Have I proclaimed that I will _not_ be following the Captain's example?" Ignitia raised a brow, sizing the human up from head to toe. "I do not trust you, Fallen, at least not entirely. I can't take away from the fact that you have dutifully protected Spyra these last few days, and she to you, but… think about what you're asking me to do. Forget all I've been taught, and all that my fellow dragons have planned for decades, all so I can follow the on-the-spot idea of an alien that fell out of the sky."

"I said the same thing." Spyra chimed. "But I actually listened to him, and, uh… yeah, really good idea to listen to him. Leads to much less heartache and shit in the mouth."

"You're either in or out." The Fallen smiled at Spyra and frowned at Ignitia. "We're going to take down that tower and stop Cynder. You can help us or watch, but don't get in our ways."

* * *

{🐉}

Palmet was busy digging inside his nose when the other fellow reemerged from the mushrooms, hopping around as he struggled with his belt.

"_Everythin go awright?_" He asked, his voice nasally tinged as he fingered his nostril. The other Ape just gave a little grunting sound and kicked one of his legs in the air as response. "Ehm, glad ta hear it."

"Did you lot find something?" Drulop's deep, guttural voice etched out from the top of the ravine.

"No, Drulop-! _I mean sir- I mean ma'am- I mean big tall and scary-_" Palmet sputtered. Drulop cut him off with an apish bark and a swing of his cleaver.

"_Agh~! _Shut it! Forget I said anythin. Just hurry up and get back in file."

Drulop's piggish eyes drooped on the second Ape at the ravine's bottom, noting the almost shamed bow of his ugly head.

"Oi, you still got the runs there, lad?"

The other Ape nodded sheepishly.

Drulop burst into foul, jagged laughter, sweeping his cleaver as he turned around and lumbered back onto the path.

"Don't leave a trail for that dragon to track us by. I'd hate ta be undone by shit." Drulop called back. "All you get yourselves in order! We're takin it west!"

Itching at the unmistakeable attentions from fleas, Palmet deflated his priorly rigid stance and chattered through his unbrushed, yellow molars. It was the nature of the Apes to hate the pecking order when they were on the low side of it. Their society was, after all, built upon the very timid back of betrayal and scheming, and Drulop was the officer of this mob, only because he was bigger and stronger and less patient than the others.

"If he didn't have dat cleaver, I'd carve in him a new lesson er two…" Palmet finished digging in his nose, angling an eye quickly at the machete hanging from his belts. Examining the wad of solid snot on his claw for a second, he popped the slimy treat in his mouth and waved at the other Ape, the one whose name he still hadn't bothered to learn. "Ya didn't tell me you were startin ta come down with the squirts, ya little filcher. What if ya infected me with ya filth? What then?"

The nameless Ape snarled and shouldered past Palmet roughly, mounting all fours and knuckle-sprinting up the ravine's ramp. Palmet rolled his jaw and hiked up after him, his chainmail clinking in the hollow din of the swamp.

"When's the mistress gonna realize that there ain't nothin out here?" He called through the willow trees and mushroom clusters. "That purple drag and the _hoo-man_ have probably turned tail and arse by now! Halfway across the geysers."

"_Are you two fuckin or somethin back there? Get back in the ranks!_" Drulop's gruff voice sailed from the distance, making Palmet wheeze as he topped the mudslide and hurried through the peat puddles and foliage.

"You couldn't have done me the courtesy of tellin him I was on my way? That's just uncivilized that is…" Palmet complained incessantly. He'd always done that since he'd been thrown in the whelp pits. It was probably why his own father had called him '_Bitch' _all the time instead of his real name.

Palmet had taught everyone better than to give him lip when he had knifed the old Ape for stealing a cooked rib from him during a feast. Nothing like turning the table into an abattoir to silence the rabble. It at least meant his dreams for authority over others weren't entirely too far fetched. To survive in the tribes you needed to be nastier than the other Apes. There wasn't an officer in Visigoth's caste corps that hadn't eaten somebody's heart or decapitated a drinking buddy when things got rough in the watering holes.

"Alright, I'm here. Let's pack it or lose it, boss." Palmet itched his fleas as he bundled through a bush and came onto the path. A motley assortment of ten other Apes turned to look at him quizzically, and at their head was Drulop, who had his neck craned around his sole iron pauldron. Palmet blinked. "…Lads… you're starin."

"Where's Latook?" One of the other soldiers croaked.

"Who the bugger nuts is Latook?"

"He didn't show before you did." Drulop was coming back to the rear of the pack, his baboon nose turned up to the wind as he tested the swamp air. "Ya didn't knife im did ya? Offisas should be informed properly before ya do."

"You lot are talkin about _Shits_, aren't ya?" Palmet snorted, the metallic taste of his own snot still thick on his tongue. "He's the one who ran ahed a me!"

"He vanished!" One of the others hooted. "Oly crapweeds, we're all gonna die! It's- It's the purple drag!"

"Shut your cake hole." Drulop silenced him with a menacing gesture of his cleaver. "He mighta just fell in a peat puddle or taken a wrong turn. No other patrols in this area have come back with unexplained losses. If the purple drag and the hooman were here, we'd ave known already."

"Coulda' been a Bulby Crawler." Palmet suggested, wriggling his fingers for emphasis in the shape of a spider. "Those fings are silent as a rat in a nook when they wanna be. Watched one snag a Toadwort a while back. Stupid fing didn't even see it comin til the Bulby got the drop."

Some of the other Apes turned their gazes fearfully at the willow tree canopies above them.

"I don't like repeatin myself." Drulop growled. "When I said shut yer cake hole, I meant _all of you lot._ Stay together and keep your eyeballs peelie. If we got trouble, I want the drop, not _dem._"

Drulop took the pack's head again and led on. Weapons were unsheathed. Palmet himself whipped out his machete and chanced a series of quick glances about the foliage, his pug-eyes darting everywhere.

"Say, what evva happened to da Chief's teeth?" Someone tried to lighten the mood, it was pretty proactive for an _Ape._ Palmet decided he was impressed, and if his last blade-partner turned up dead, then he'd proposition this new fellow for the job. "Other lads are sayin the purple drag knocked a lot of em out with a rock or something."

"Visigoth's good and fixed." Drulop rumbled. "The healers and some weirdo-invention from that Tinker bugger solved him right."

"How come the Chief gets the potions while we're stuck with maggot-meat, rags and harsh language?" Someone else snorted. Drulop spun around and backhanded the offender across the jaw, sending a bloody tooth spiraling into the foliage. The lesser Ape howled and nursed his mandible.

"Now yu can be like the Chief, _without_ the fixin." Drulop snarled. "Any other stupid questions for the afternoon?"

Palmet was snickering at the misfortune of his comrades when his foot slapped into a puddle.

A warm, wet and recent puddle. He looked down.

Deep crimson.

"_Blood?_" He yelped.

"_Ooo-Ha! _Good one there." Another soldier tugged at the wounded one's mouth, earning a pained shriek. "… Wait, that's not funny. You're just observin shite. That's dumb comedy thievery!"

"No, you arse-tickler, _blood~!_" Palmet pointed, panicked.

Drulop stormed over and gazed at the puddle of viscera for a moment, before he looked off behind a cloister of mushrooms. Laying there in a heap was the limp body of Latook, his lifeless eyes staring up at the canopy above, his throat opened and rendering his upper body sticky with an arterial downpour of nearly black fluid.

"Aw nuts…" Palmet ran his foot through the dirt. "…I stepped in Latook's jam. What luck for me."

"Stay together and watch all our sides, we-" Drulop turned around and gawked at his squad.

Now, no Apes were good at math, but Drulop was an _officer,_ which meant he didn't have the _advanced_ form of stupidity that the majority of his kind did. He could pick out a warrior missing, and even some of the other soldiers were starting to realize it too.

"_They got Friknut!_" The same hysterics-chanter from earlier squealed. "Oly fuckweazles _we're bloody doomed!_"

Drulop was just about to slash open the smaller Ape's face for cowardice, when suddenly, a thicket rustled and something appeared on the side of the footpath.

Turning, the Apes saw a pale-skinned, thin creature bedecked in a black, torn up jumpsuit, riddled in blades, a crossbow and a bandolier of explosives.

Palmet's brain clicked, like a slow cooker going off.

"_It's the hoo-man~!_" He shrieked, clutching his machete like it was a comforting teddy-bear. The Ape gasped before giving off a piercing, feminine scream.

The Ape with the broken jaw tried to say something, but all that came out was a burble around the blood pooling in his teeth. Someone bellowed a warcry and several of the warriors surged forwards, weapons high in the air.

Drulop sneered and ripped a stick of dynamite out of his hip sash. He struck the fuse tug and hurled it at the human.

The Fallen lashed out with his heel and sent an Ape tumbling. He ducked under a blade and hooked his arms around the second attacker's ribcage, throwing him into the third. All three Apes fell in a tussle. The Fallen caught the dynamite stick like a baseball, underhanded it into the flopping mess of bodies, and stepped back.

**_Bannnggg~!_**

-Palmet thought the path was becoming obscured by fog. When he licked his teeth and realized that it was a metallic-tasting mist, he understood better.

"_Where'd he go?_" An Ape howled. "He disappeared!"

"Stay together! He's usin hit and run!" Drulop snapped, freeing a small warhorn from his belt. He went to press the nozzle to his chipped lips, when a shrill whistle stole the remaining squad's attention.

"_Oooooh boys~._" Spyra sniggered, having jumped onto the path. She had her rump raised in the air, and even gave the Apes a mocking wiggle of her hips. She raised a purple brow and craned back a paw to slap her ass. "Don't ya' want some roast dragon haunch? I promise I don't bite."

Drulop snarled and started to step forward, but a pained wheeze from behind him drew his attention.

Another Ape lye dead on the dirt, his throat opened just like Latook's had been. The Fallen himself had moved on to Palmet, and had him in a headlock, the stolen blade he was wielding compressing the panicking warrior's carotid.

However, the Fallen was prevented from finishing the kill, his eyes were wide, and his jaw was agape.

_Durg booty._

Palmet struggled in his grip, dropping his machete to claw at the human's head locking arm.

"-_I surrender-! Have mercy, have mercy! I'll do anyfing you want-!_" Suddenly, the Ape felt a disturbance from behind. He went still and craned over to see that the _hoo-man_ was sporting a particularly noticeable bulge in the jumpsuit's crotch. Palmet screamed even louder. "_Noooooooo~! I take it back! For bugger's sake JUST FUCKIN KILL ME!_"

"No, wait! All of you need to look over _here!_ Here! See the butt? See the…" Spyra spun around with an angry look as all the Apes jumped at the Fallen again. "-Son of a bitch! Who woulda' thunk it. All of Cynder's monkeys are _gay!_"

But not the Fallen.

_Those hips are- _

The Fallen hissed through his teeth and dropped Palmet like a bad habit. The Ape squealed as his own comrades trampled him in their rush.

One of the Apes swung a club and smashed the Fallen in the wrist. He cried out from the blow, and his looted Ape-blade went flipping off into the swamp.

Spinning on an ankle, the Fallen nursed his bleeding arm and came back with a rounded kick. The blow shattered the Ape's teeth and sent him reeling. Another rushed into the breach, swinging madly, driving the Fallen onto the ground as the human was forced to scrabble back for safety.

Spyra darted out of the woodwork, her claws flickering but once. The Ape fell to his knees when a trio of deep gashes seemingly materialized out of nowhere across his chest and throat after the dragoness passed, blood fell in a misting fountain.

Spyra landed and bathed the last of the Ape soldiers in a torrent of liquid fire. The Fallen had to shield his face from the heat as the Apes' screams were drowned out in an elemental whoosh. They came apart as they collapsed, their fur blistering away and their skin turning to rubber.

When one of the bodies didn't fall fast enough, Spyra snapped her jaws closed, killed the stream of flame, and swatted the smoldering cadaver to ruin with a spinning tail whip.

The Ape's corpse crinkled like burnt paper when it hit the ground.

"You okay, alien-man?" Spyra offered a wing and yanked the Fallen to his feet.

"Better now that you're here." He wheezed. "When I said to distract them, I didn't mean _entice them._"

"You said to improvise!" She defended.

He reached into his suit hem for another regen-injection. He couldn't feel his arm, and peering at it revealed that the club strike had most likely shattered the bone. His skin was turning black and purple.

"Heya', reminds you of a chick, don't it?" Spyra grimaced.

"Funny." The Fallen winced as he spat the cap off and stuck the syringe home. A bone snapped and he snarled in agony. The purple and black bruising began to dematerialize before their eyes. "Wasn't the goal to take one of these people _alive?_"

"It's their fault." Spyra accusingly looked down at the smoldering corpses. The Fallen retrieved his blade and wiped the gore off on an ashen victim's ankle. "Besides, we still got one more to-"

Drulop finished blowing out the horn's alarm signal before tossing it away and brandishing his cleaver. The larger Ape roared as loud as he could and ran for them, taking a small roundel shield off his back to match his cleaver.

"_For the Dark Mistress!_" He bellowed, bringing his weapon down in a strike.

Spyra zipped around his heels and the Fallen sidestepped to safety. Before Drulop could blink, his world became fire and pain.

Spyra lit him up like a Roman Candle. The Ape screamed horrifically as his flesh cindered off his bones. He fell to his knees, dropped his weapons and cried out in a long drawl of sheer agony meshed with the crackle of fire.

The Fallen stepped forwards and sliced him through the flames across his face. Steaming blood spurted out and the officer tumbled backward in a crumpled heap, the fire extinguishing itself as soon as life left his broken form.

"_Alive,_ huh?" Spyra panted.

"God damn it." The Fallen slapped his own forehead. "Stop setting them on fire!"

"I can't help it, dude! It's like my inner dragoness is coming out for the first time! Those Mana Crystals were dope as fuck." Spyra giggled, sauntering around the blistering cadaver on wiggling hips, like she was doing a jig. "I feel better than ever!"

"-But that's-" The Fallen stopped himself, and let his frustration out with a sigh. "…Well I'm happy for you."

"If it didn't smell like crispy dead people right now…" Spyra left the sentence hanging in the air. Her eyes hungrily drew around the Fallen's face.

The atmosphere changed instantly, the human lowering his arms and staring dumbly at her.

"-...Hey, Fallen?"

"Yeah?" He was staring at her purple, feral ass.

"Is it weird that I kinda' want to fuck you right now?"

If he had a hope in high hell of concealing the boner, it burned away with the Apes and their ill-gotten hides.

In fact, something probably would've happened right at that moment, even over all the charred dead monkey corpses. The Fallen had dropped his blade and Spyra was preening her wings. Truthfully, she was white as a sheet, and _trembling._ Even battle-adrenaline didn't do that to her!

Then the cockblock-express just had to barge in and ruin everything.

The air rumbled under the duress of a shrill, abominable cry, followed by the ragged reports of hoots and barks coming from behind some mushrooms and willows.

"Oh, look at that there's…. _more of them…_" Spyra deflated like a popped balloon, scrunching her muzzle in disappointment. It even looked like her horns drooped.

An Ape that was even larger than Drulop leaped out from the foliage, his wild pug eyes locking on the pair.

He was wearing a set of iron pauldrons over all his other ragtag gear. An axe clenched in his fist crackled with bands of golden energy, and a wide berthed steel shield curled over his opposite arm.

The Ape Commander barked like a dog, drooling as he battered the flat of his axe on the shield in a challenge.

"We can take him." Spyra snickered, hip-bumping the Fallen.

**_Crash~! _**–something the size of a small elephant fell out of the sky and kicked up a dust cloud.

* * *

**_{Halo 4 OST: Desecration}_**

* * *

The Fallen and Spyra stepped back as a hunchbacked, scale-ridden beast mounted up from the impact site. It had a hanging, fanged maw decorated with drool-slicked teeth. A pair of yellow eyes stared listlessly at them from a goblinoid and snarling face. Its arched neck was bedecked in spines that shivered in reaction to the monster's rage.

It had no front arms to match its digitigrade clawed feet. Instead, its wyvern-like build was accentuated with a flight of jet black and ragged bat wings. There was an Ape riding on its spine, whipping the thing forwards with a set of hastily strapped reins and coarse language.

There were talons, wicked teeth and claws available to this creature, and perhaps the two companions were more prepared for _those_ than anything else.

So when the monster inhaled an audible gust of breath, they knew something was amiss.

The Dreadwing heaved back and _screamed._

Within a second, the Fallen had collapsed. He dropped his weapon as the boom ricocheted around the interior of his skull, hearing only white noise through the crippling sonic attack.

Spyra bucked onto her rear legs and shrieked, she tried to spread her wings to take flight, but they spasmed and only sent her crashing to the ground. Tears welled in her eyes and she writhed in agony.

The Fallen barely managed to get on a heel before he tried to call for her, but he couldn't even hear himself much less get across to her.

"_Spyra!_" He shouted, crawling over to grab and shake her shoulder.

"-_Yah!_" The Ape rider howled and flicked the reigns. The Dreadwing snapped its jaws, and started to run on its heavy wing-joints and feet, bounding at them in the style of an angry grizzly bear.

**_Ba-dmm ba-dmm ba-dmm ba-dmm_**

The Dreadwing had to weigh at least a ton.

Holy fuck this was bad.

The Fallen shook Spyra one last time as the Dreadwing got closer. It shrieked, just as the dragoness opened her eyes, though she was still cringing horribly, like someone had driven a knife in her leg and was twisting.

"Get up!" The Fallen hiked an arm under her breast and yanked her to her feet. "_Get. Up._"

The Dreadwing was on top of them in a second. A high pitched squeal rung out from its throat, a sort of pleased trill at the possibility of fresh prey-meat. It snapped its jaws shut in a vice, trying to clip the Fallen in half at the waist.

He dove under the Dreadwing's spiny belly and rolled with Spyra still wrapped in his arms. It was by sheer dumb luck that the bat-creature didn't trample them with its stomping rear talons. These shuddered the ground and passed over them in a rush of dust.

The Dreadwing howled and preened on its hinds, leaping backward to right itself as it darted around in confusion of where its meal had gone. The rider was on the border of having a stroke as he yanked on the reins, shouting repeatedly, and then resorting to batting the monster's hairy mane and pointing at their quarry.

"_Wake up, stupid! They went under ya!_"

"You okay?" The Fallen stood them both up, and dusted off her wings.

"I-I think so." Spyra prepared herself beside him, gazing in horror at the Dreadwing's haunches as the rider finally righted his mount, and it prepared for another barreling charge. "What the hell is that thing?!"

"I don't know." The Fallen cringed at a fresh array of cuts and bruises on both of them. He turned and saw more Ape soldiers flooding out from the foliage. A whole other mob. And just when things were looking easy. "Why do ambushes never work?"

"Is bitching the plan now?" Spyra shook it off, laughing, even though _now_ the battle-adrenaline was making her tremble. She'd never admit that though. He knew she'd sooner die. "Talk to me, dude."

"We're getting boxed in." The Fallen fell to a knee and gestured for her. "Catapult and make a hole!"

"You got it!"

Spyra ran forwards and vaulted off the Fallen's back, spreading her wings, she soared right over the approaching line of Ape infantry. Many of them hooted and barked, swinging just short of her paws in futile swipes and hacks.

Spyra answered them by bathing the center of their ranks in a billowing cone of flames. Apes on the edges of the blast screamed as clothes and fur caught fire. The ones in the direct center burned to death, writhing silently as inhaled heat melted their vocal chords.

"Aren't you a pretty little thing." The Fallen stepped back as the Dreadwing trundled towards him. It opened its mouth and screamed at him in a shrill challenge. "Come here and give us a kiss."

The rider snapped the reigns and the Dreadwing charged.

_Probably could have thought that through a little bit more…_

The Fallen came to the realization that he didn't have anything he could do to stop the monster. A rapidly approaching mass of weight that had lots of sharp stabby bits on it was tumbling right for him.

It was the worst time to be caught standing around with one's thumb up their ass.

But he tried to make due.

It just didn't end so well.

**_Thwack~! _**–the Fallen couldn't even scream as the Dreadwing royally kicked his ass, negating his attempt to roll away with an effective swat of its mighty bat wing.

The Fallen flipped through the air and crushed a cloister of mushrooms, spore pods spewing everywhere in nasty plumes of foul-smelling smog.

Holding his breath, he grunted through the pain and rolled, relying on his weight to flatten any of the smaller caps. The Dreadwing landed where he lye a second later, squashing the rest of the cloister and showering the shredded remains with a flurry of bites that could've punctured sheet metal.

The Fallen hopped painfully astride and slashed his blade across the Dreadwing's thigh. Black blood spurted from the wound and the monster shrieked. It spun around and swatted him again.

**_P-dnnffff~!_**

-This time, he hit a tree.

And by fuck's dick did it hurt.

He considered it a good thing nobody was around to see him mewling like a little bitch on the ground, holding his ribs. He felt a bit like Corrinthol, actually, in this awful moment of kinship with the crimson testicular-fondler.

Not that he regretted choking that bastard out.

Guy was a douchebag.

"…_Mary had a little dragon… and I can't feel my FUCKIN RIBS…_" The Fallen barked, trembling as he stood back up. "_Do you know what happens to people who play ragdoll with me?! You crooked-jaw Dracula wannabe?_"

In full gear? With all of his normal toys?

This would've been a joke. Medieval warfare had nothing against modern tech.

The problem was, the Fallen was still caught in a realm that had abandoned him. Apes were easy. Dreadwings? He'd need a fresh strategy.

"I don't have time for this shit, I'm gonna' rip your throat out, you-"

**_FWAP~!_**

-It was like a cat batting around a ball of yarn.

He indented the center of a thicket with a crunch and lye there, dazed eyes trying to make sense of the swarm of lantern bugs that were frightened from hiding around the bush as they fled from him.

_The advantage of not being able to feel something: hit it again? Numb as can be, baby._

Reminded him of a lot of past experiences.

The last thing that had played chew-toy with him, he'd wound up fucking. It was too bad the Dreadwing was the ugliest son of a bitch he'd recently encountered in the reptile/bat kingdom.

The Fallen was still trying to get up when his attacker returned for yet another round. This time, it would've proven to be the last.

But just as the Dreadwing was about to sink its teeth into his soft, pliant human flesh, a jet of fire streamed out and washed over the shrieking abomination's face.

The Dreadwing screamed and reared on its hinds, using its huge wingspan to block the stream of flame from further melting its mug. Even then, the dragonflame began to singe through the membranes and char the joints.

Spyra flapped her wings and hovered over the Fallen, giving it all she had.

_That makes two today! _–He had no doubt she'd scoff him with if she could.

The Ape Commander belted out a challenge and strode forward to the engagement. The Fallen painfully rolled to a stand and gasped at the Ape's axe. He was pointing it, like it was a wand, and the looping bands of electricity dancing down its haft were concentrating just above the cap.

He figured the weapon had been enchanted to begin with, but this…

"_NO!_" The Fallen cried.

The Ape's arm jolted, and a pure strain lightning bolt shot out from the axe with the speed of a bullet. It danced across the distance like a strange, airborne serpent, flying right over his head and colliding with Spyra's ribcage.

The Purple Dragoness was smacked out of the sky with a cringe-worthy **_Bzzttt~! _**–of noise. She trailed soot and flipped like an out of control plane before vanishing in a thicket.

The Fallen lost his mind.

Screaming at the very top of his lungs, a repeat of what had happened by the river corpse began to play out. Pure and unadulterated rage began to flow through the Fallen's veins in place of his own blood. Adrenaline surged into his muscles and he couldn't feel his own insides.

It felt like magma had replaced his internal organs. He was weightless, and everything had a flavor of red tinged into it.

The Dreadwing was still screeching, thundering the earth as it thrashed and kicked, apparently, suffering from its eyes being burned out of its skull.

The Fallen's bruises and fractures were but for naught with the angered invigoration at seeing his draconic companion getting shot out of the clouds. He sprinted, ducking underneath one of its wings before latching onto the reigns. He swung on the chord like it was a vine and landed just behind the Ape rider's little saddle on the Dreadwing's massive back.

The rider just turned around and blinked, unable to process the speed in which he'd been boarded.

The Fallen encapsulated the simian warrior's mandible and throat into the groove of his arm crease. He compressed and wrenched his shoulder, nearly twisting the Ape's head completely around.

The corpse tumbled from the seat as the Dreadwing bucked on its hind legs. The Fallen snarled, holding onto one of the beast's spines and the rear of the saddle for leverage. He dangled in the air until the Dreadwing landed back on its fores with a thunderous _bang!_ Slipping into the throne-like mount, the human yanked on the reigns so harshly that he drew blood from the bat's oral creases.

"_Yah!_" He screamed, whipping the monster into a frenzy with fevered kicks and yanks. The Dreadwing screeched- maddened by the pain eating away at its face –and barreled in whatever direction the Fallen willed.

A cluster of Apes screamed as their own beast of burden trampled them. The physical strength of the Dreadwing was terrible indeed. Organs splashed out as Apes were compressed bodily to the dirt and completely flattened. The blinded bat monster killed indiscriminately, driven crazy by the unbearable surge of damage it had suffered. The Fallen had the look of a madman on his face as he drove the living weapon about the battlefield like it was a bulldozer, sometimes smashing already felled corpses just for seeing a reflexive spasm in a leg or arm.

The Ape Commander and a small cadre of soldiers closest to him were the only ones who initially escaped the rampage. The officer swept his axe in a wide arc, directing a bundle of maybe eight of his lessers in a flanking move. Bands of lightning shot out from the weapon next and fried the Dreadwing's furry back just ahead of the Fallen's feet.

The beast shrieked as its hide blistered and cooked. The Fallen could feel the electricity himself, mounted on the thing. It felt like someone was rapidly jittering his limbs up and down so fast that his bones were turning numb. He saw black and white and started to tumble from the saddle.

He looped once past the rampaging bat's ribs. A quick lash of his arm, and he used his newly stolen Ape blade as a meat-hook, latching onto the beast's flank.

The Dreadwing screamed even louder and started to alter its charge path to the side he was stabbed through. The Fallen was dragged through the dirt, grunting as he swerved his legs side to side to avoid getting them crushed under the Dreadwing's rear foot.

The Ape Commander threw himself from the warpath and rolled to safety through the dust. The Fallen snarled as he was helpless to adjust the Dreadwing's direction.

_Unless._

He flailed, grabbing the blade's shaft with both hands. He twisted the steel in the wound.

The Dreadwing sharply made a turn and crashed head-first into a thick willow tree, causing the whole trunk to shiver like it was suffering a small earthquake.

The Dreadwing compressed like a pancake against the tree's foot, its wings shooting out awkwardly, one of them ripping the Fallen's blade from its ribs to send him rolling off. The monster quivered, deflating like a lawn decoration being cut off from its air pump. Blood leaked like rivers of tar from its cracked head. The cadaver twitched and lay there like a hairy mass of meat.

_…I've had worse rodeos._

The Fallen was forced to kill even as he recovered. He had to drag the first Ape down with a series of stabs to the feet and then the stomach. Bathing in blood, he wrestled another to the ground and gutted him like a fish.

It was only when the Commander was running over with that wicked axe, that a bolt of lightning shot out and eviscerated the last trio of soldiers hanging over the Fallen's prone form.

The Apes shrieked as electricity caused them to enact a macabre sort of dance. They looked like they were vibrating, even as soot started to leak from every orifice in their bodies. One of their heads exploded in a burst of skull fragments and gore. All three toppled, black and steaming.

Even the Commander looked _shocked._

It was Spyra. She was running out from the foliage, mouth open, bands of… _lightning_ shooting from her throat.

….Dafuq?

The Fallen rose to his knees, marveling as bolts of yellow power erupted past Spyra's fangs and danced over the Commander Ape's armored form. Evidently, he wasn't so resistant to his own spice being dished against him.

He screamed as Spyra zapped an educational message into every nerve ending on his furry husk. When he took too long to die, the Fallen grabbed up a machete lying on the bloodstained earth. He chucked it from the blade, where it flipped thrice and embedded to the hilt right through the Commander's furry temple.

The massive Ape's jaw clattered, like he was a nutcracker, and he toppled to the ground with a mighty crash.

There was some dust, but after that?

Nothin'.

Not even the birds were chirping anymore.

* * *

**_{Spyro The Eternal Night Soundtrack: Dreams}_**

* * *

Who the hell could say anything after a hot mess like _that?_ The Fallen and Spyra slowly limped to one another through the field of bodies. Tens and tens of Apes lye in various states of dismemberment, insectile squashing and disarray.

The fucking clearing looked like a scene out of a horror movie. Spyra didn't even know things could bleed that much.

"…You okay there, hotshot?" Spyra panted weakly, giving him the most exhausted smile she had ever offered.

"Forget me." The Fallen collapsed to his knees, holding his hands out for her snout. Spyra grinned at him and peeled back her chops, and he watched in awe as little bands of electricity played through her teeth. "…How are you doing that?"

"_I dummo. But ish cuul ash fuqq._" She muffled, flexing her brows. "Commodore Francisco over there must've… I dunno', unlocked some kind of inner elemental thing inside me with that axe. I've… never been electrocuted before."

The Fallen laughed a little bit and rubbed her shoulders.

"Thank Christ for that." He chuckled.

"Which? Innocence up till' now, or the zap?" Spyra clunked foreheads with him and shut her eyes, trying to concentrate on getting her heart rate to lower. "'Cause I'm thinking both."

"I'd say both." He nodded slowly, reaching up to stroke the fiery fins running down her scalp. They felt a lot plusher than he would've pictured. Almost like marshmallows. "You saved my life."

"…Nah, it wasn't anything. I was just getting us even is all." Spyra nuzzled him. "I can't let anything happen to my first friend, my alien, human-boy friend."

Spyra put two and two together and went very quiet.

"…That came out a little differently than I meant. _B-But it didn't, too… I… I hope…_"

"You hope?" The Fallen heaved, wincing as his ribs flared up again.

"I'm not shallow." Spyra immediately gulped.

"Who fucking cares."

Then, he ate her face.

Well, at least he tried.

Spyra must have resembled a deer in headlights as the Fallen surged forwards all at once, and mashed his lips into the merger of her muzzle.

It was supposed to be a kiss, but seeing as Spyra had a snout, it turned more into a mouth-lock/tongue-duel sort of thing. Was it enough to warrant a complaint? Hell no. Not from either of them. This was the most exhilarating thing she'd ever done in her life, bar none.

Not even zapping a giant monkey to death came close to this.

All of the fantasies that had buzzed in Spyra's young mind came flashing back at once. The idea of males, their bodies, their differences, and their masculine smell, it all happened in the same breath. Spyra's eyes rolled back into her head. She lifted her paws off the ground and hooked them over the Fallen's shoulders, letting him push her until her back compressed to the ground and his hands were pinning her shoulders. He twisted his head and pried open her soft mouth, chancing her fangs as he lapped his smaller tongue over hers in a fantastic mesh of squelching spit and slapping flesh.

Spyra didn't care how she sounded. She belted out the most whorish moan she could manage, captivated by the human's metallic taste, and the spongy, pliable strips of skin that made his lips.

Her tongue was like a serpent's, and so there wasn't much space for it to explore as she fought off his advances and invaded his mouth in turn. She couldn't work out a better description besides _puffy_ for the interior of his throat. She unwound her licker's whole length, bundling it like a gigantic licorice rope inside his face until she literally ran out of room.

She dragged her rear talons across his thighs, cupping the raging bulge in the groin of his jumpsuit between her toes and squeezing. The Fallen grunted animalistically, dry-humping her legs apart and ramming his needle-thin hips into the glorious valley of her thick, plush and scaly nethers.

Enough of his jumpsuit was ripped that the impact produced a _clap! _–of skin bouncing off scale. Spyra made a '_Hmmff~!_' –sound with each thrust. He drummed into her like a piston, bouncing the thin barricade shielding him from her off her golden tummy.

"-_Wait-wait-_" Spyra slicked away from his mouth, cooing when he slipped down her jaw and started to bite her neck. That was enough to start a motor. Spyra gasped when she realized that a consistent rumble was starting to drum about inside her breast.

Even the Fallen paused for a second, leaving her golden throat to smile at her smartly.

"Got you to purr." He winked.

"Time out, stud, I need a minute…" Spyra giggled, pushing him off her a bit with her wings. He lay on top of her for a while, allowing the only ambiance to be their hushed breathing. Covered in lacerations and bruises, both of them stared at each other in a long moment of quiet. "…I had absolutely no idea you were this into me." She joked.

"Dragonesses are my specialty." He said. "Why do you think I started jumping between worlds to begin with? I love your kind."

"We're not spinning any yarns though, right?" Spyra ground her hips against him, slowly, testing the feel of his rigid, lithe body against her plusher form. "This is… _physical,_ purely physical. I mean, I-I like you… Okay, I _really_ like you, more than I should. In fact it's probably shameful as fuck. But I've never really cared about stuff like that because it just seemed so stupid to care about. 'Specially because I've been alone, and guys never existed around these parts before and…"

She noticed that he was grinning at her like an idiot. Spyra fluttered her eyelids and blushed, giving him an embarrassed punch on the chest.

"_What~?_" She laughed, pawing her cheeks.

"You are adorable." He openly admitted. "Out of all the worlds I could've crashed on, I'm thankful I crashed on this one. There's no shortage of excitement around here, but none of that really adds up to you." He glanced briefly at all the carnage around them. "You're a trip, girlie."

"I should've screamed my problems at the sky earlier." Spyra muttered, biting her thumb as she watched the Fallen's groin and rubbed her own itching nethers against it.

"What?"

"Nevermind. So, uh… listen, you got needs, I got needs… Little Fallen down here is obviously in working order." Spyra spread her thick thighs a little more and revealed the winking length of her draconic slit. It was a magenta-hued sort-of pink. It was ringed by tightly wound, softer and smaller golden plates, and it was drooling enough for a seasoned dentist to lose his tools in the underflow. Glistening beads of liquid trimmed down the length and left a noticeable damp spot on the Fallen's jumpsuit.

That perfume smell was back and in force. It was so strong that it made his head buzz.

_Pheromones._

It was torture every day, being able to literally smell out prime dragoness pussy like a fucking bloodhound.

Relief only came in indulgence. It'd been too long on his own end. At least, since the last portal. Dragonesses were things that needed to be enjoyed like fine wines. Temperament, a little seasoning through abstinence and a choice moment of action were what was needed when fulfilling the cravings of what had ultimately proven to be ravenous sexual creatures.

The Fallen wanted nothing more than to breed this purple beauty like she was a dripping bitch in heat.

Looking down at her slobbering her own cunt over his crotch, the description was pretty apt.

"…_Mmf~, _I'm game, human-boi'…" Spyra huskily grunted. "…You wanna' fool around in a corpse-pit? You like kinky stuff right? I'll pull a _Cynder_ for ya' if it gets you going…"

"I don't want you to be Cynder, I want you to be you." He shuddered, working the compressed length of his dragon-conquerer between Spyra's lips. He hooked the bulge between her labia, gasping when she suckled through the jumpsuit material across his grith. It felt like he was running his puppy through a pair of gelatin cubes while it was in a blanket.

"…Do you really mean that?" Spyra sounded half-joking. But he knew she was entirely vulnerable. _Again._

He answered by kissing her on the snout.

"You're perfect." He said. Spyra allowed a warm and slow smile to form. She held onto him tighter and sighed happily. She impossibly looked even cuter.

If he didn't pork the purple out of this dragoness soon, his balls would sprout arms, wield knives and murder him.

But….

_There was always a mother fucking but._

_And a butt. Purple butt._

The Fallen growled possessively and snagged two handfuls of bountiful dragon haunch, squeezing as hard as he could, he ran their hips together and indulged in a last moment of burying his groin in Spyra's plush, shapely body.

The purple reptile for her own part gave out a pained cry and locked eyes with him, licking her teeth as she rolled her waistline and lipped his dog through the suit. Surrounded by a stinking battle scene or not, sex was the global mediator.

"…_We didn't stick to plan._" The Fallen grumbled, merging their foreheads as he started to yank at the straps of his jumpsuit hem.

"_I'd say fuck the plan. But don't fuck the plan..._" Spyra opened her mouth and blew a smoke-ring across his face. "_Fuck _me,_ alien-boi'. Show a 'ness what you got._"

The Fallen practically ripped his lower band off and sent a cavalcade of stolen equipment rattling to the earth nearby.

_Fuck it._

_Plans could kiss his royal crusading ass. This whole world and its politics and wars and Apes and other dragons could all go blow a fat one. He was plowing this hen right fucking here._

Besides, he almost got eaten by a giant mutated bat.

The least this place could do was give him a good durg-snatch to conquer. Spyra's was as fine as he had. Could there be some improvements? Sure.

The Fallen sized her up as he whipped out his pale rod and adjusted his knee placement. Spyra was licking her muzzle and staring at the organ just like she had when she had first seen it after he crashed. There she was, curvy, thick hipped, elegantly rounded at the chest, a prime feral gem.

…There was always time to allocate changes.

But he needed the rest of his gear to do that. That came later.

"…I've been thinking about how we could get this started." The Fallen admitted, stroking himself and aligning with Spyra's dripping opening. "But that's turning into another plan that didn't survive contact. Should I…?"

"I don't need foreplay right now, I need a quickie. Give me a dirty, roughhouse after-battle _fuck,_ you hung alien stud, you hear me? _Rut me into the fuckin' ground already._"

The Fallen pressed the tip into her folds, and Spyra squeaked as she clawed onto his shoulders and buried her head in his neck. Avoiding her horns, her flame-spines stuck in his face, but they were so soft and plushy, that he didn't mind. It was like a big teddy-bear. A big teddy-bear that was anatomically correct, purple and undeniably sexy.

…Here goes, and hopes to avoiding himself getting rusty…. As he'd said, it'd been a while…

Spyra shivered as his spear parted the first barriers of her gates. It wasn't exactly troublesome. She was so lubricated by this point that she could've filled a water bottle. It was so new! She'd used her paws before, and hell, she had a few homebrew toys hidden under her nest back home, but to have an actual penis sticking in there?

Especially an _alien penis?_

Humans were the best.

The Fallen got another whiff of dragoness pheromones and plunged deeper. Just a few more seconds of travel, warm, slippery, velvety travel between parting rings of muscle and flaps and then….

His sack met the warm merger of her purple cheeks. The Fallen grunted. It felt like God was a woman and had just up and flipped aside her holy robes and sat on his dick.

It might've been that Spyra was a bit smaller, but damnation was she _tight._ It bordered phallic strangulation. Silky strangulation.

"-_Hwooo~!_" Spyra breathed, like a cool gust of wind had briskly blown in her face. She trembled a little. "…_W-Wow… it… it kinda' hurts… actually…. Ow-!_"

Spyra hissed, whining as a few slow stabs of discomfort started to imbed themselves amid the more pleasurable sensations of her interior walls being so deliciously spread. The Fallen controlled his need to start rabidly humping the poor dragon, and forced himself to rub as softly as he could manage across her purple hips.

"Give it a few minutes." He grit his teeth, grinding his forehead into her breast. He slid down her face to get there, like he was melting from the groin down. The expression he had could only be described as _strained._ "_Guhhhh~… Fuck._"

"Looks like I got the same style on the i-inside too, huh?" Spyra snickered, burying her snout in his messy hair and inhaling his scent. "-_Ooooooo… that's… d-did you always have this vein running down your dick, dude? Geez', that must stand out, how'd I not see it?_"

She clenched her vaginal muscles and laughed when he grunted in torment.

"I spent so long looking at the thing, you'd think I'd have a photographic shot of your cock up here by now." Spyra nuzzled his hair, working her hips into a slow rhythm of rolling. "…_Wow… this is…. OoooOOoooHhhhhh…. This is NICE….~_"

"Could get used to it right?" He breathed.

"Could get used to it." She parroted, bucking her hips. "I think I'm okay now."

"You sure?"

"Do I look like one of those emotional- _ah~! _–bitches who wants you to m-make _love_ to them? No. _–Ahh! _–I. Need. _You. To. Fuck me._" She bit into his hair, and her tail started to curl around one of his legs. "_C'mon, human-boi', show me what a jackhammer does. Shove some hatchlings in my cunt._"

Son of a bitch. She could talk dirty, who figured? It shouldn't have been surprising. It was always the potty-mouths…

The Fallen started to get up a slow working of thrusts, her pink flower spreading and compressing with each pass of his rod. Spyra gasped, and she started to leak from the merger. Dragon-juices glittered in the afternoon sun as he literally fucked the waterworks out of her.

Nearby, the dead Dreadwing slumped to the side from where it had been face-smashed into the tree. Its cadaver rumbled the ground with a muted **_thwmp~! _**–as it rolled to a halt. The human and the dragon were too absorbed in their fevered grinding to even take notice.

"…_H-Hey… I'm just thinking of this now._" Spyra's voice hitched with each thrust. Liquid squelched and her own flesh started to echo out loudly as he pummeled her hole. She drooled as she spoke. "…_w-what if more o-of them commmmmeeeeeohhhhAncestorssssfuckmeee….~_"

The Fallen didn't answer her. He hiked her purple hips up and started to piston into her depths, hammering the dragoness into the dirt with a good few impacts. Spyra yipped and drew blood from her claws on his shoulders.

A particularly accurate thrust jabbed his head into a tender spot. She quickly ripped her nose from his hair, and a stream of broiling fire shot out of her throat and singed the atmosphere right over where they were laying.

Recovering was the tricky bit. She saw spots as she bit off the stream of dragonflame, soot trailing from her snout even through her attempts to stifle the spicy outburst. She mewled and rubbed her nose in his hair, trying to physically compress as much of her scaly body to him as she could.

The Fallen was mechanical in his precision, but tender in his direction. He had an established strategy, and so far it had worked on a pretty varied testbed. It was proving popular with the purple beastess as she moaned, rumbled and snarled, quite pleased with the fervent interspecies breeding.

"…._You've done this before._" Spyra opened an eye, weighing her paws on his chest. "_Be straight with me._"

"_Don't ruin the mood._" He muffled in her breast. Spyra creased a chop and kicked her wings. They rolled and he landed on his back, her straddling him, wiggling her hips to work in his cock in a more approachable angle from their new position. "You like being on top?"

"Right now, I'm kinda' shooting in the dark and finding what's sweetest…" Spyra sharply inhaled as he sank balls-deep again, smiling as she rolled her jiggling, purple hips and squeezed his member inside. "…_What do you think?_"

The Fallen was too busy humping up into her with his head craned back into the dirt to answer. He looked drunk as he fed the addiction, smiling like a dumbass and grunting up a storm. Spyra grinned and pinched her muscles, chuckling in pleasure when she made him sing.

"…_I-I think I'm getting the hang of this…_"

"_You're a fast learner, but I told you that already._" He raised a finger, his voice literally getting pounded out of him as Spyra raised her hips and started landing in his lap with a series of pained hums. Skin and scale plopped loudly, Spyra's tail swinging in gracious arcs over the merger as she sank her chest to his and rode him. "…_AH-ahha… purple dragon... so… nice…._"

"_You like that?_" Spyra muttered in his ear, slamming herself down on him as hard as she could, his spear penetrating her deeply enough to part the initial ring of her cervix. As it seemed, internally, dragonesses had a map of femininity that he could read pretty well. But _some_ things were too different to overlook… "…_T-That's my egg cooker you're feelin'._"

The Fallen wheezed. All he could hear was that dastardly, fleshy plopping sound. It was the beating of a war drum of sex. _Down down down down down._ Stabbing something had never felt so good. Friction and friction, masses of undeniably female, scaly flesh wobbling around over his legs and his waist.

"…_C'mon, hu-man… C'mon… I know you can do it~._" Spyra moaned, wedging her face in the crook of his neck as the pleasure became too much. Her vision swam, and she growled as she drove her cunt over him even harder. **_Plap-plap-plap~! _**–Oh, woe betide his pelvis.

Necessary sacrifices for greater men.

"_…Breed me~. Give Spyra some nice new whelps…~_" **_Plap-plap-plap~! _**Thunder! Good heavens almighty… she wouldn't. It was too much.

"…_B-Breed me. C'mon,_" She paused, letting her hitched breaths mark the brief interlude before: "-_spurt all over momma's eggs._"

Oh lords…

The Fallen didn't have a word in the English language that was appropriate to describe the blaring jumble of nonsense that invaded his mind.

It was something like insanity, something like a gunshot, a lot like a supernova.

It was explosive.

With a final, bottoming-out thrust, the Fallen's balls unloaded with the might of a pair of sibling gods. Two stars seeding forth their power. Spyra screamed as he grabbed her backside and smashed their hiplines together. Their organs twitched spastically as globules of intermeshed fluids erupted in ejaculatory torrents from within her lips and spattered him, her and the dirt beneath them both.

He painted the purple dragoness white as the poor Fallen jerked and twisted in all kinds of strange poses, his face doing a tango of expressions he didn't even know he had. He came so hard that angels somewhere erupted in chorused song.

He came so hard that other women across the Multiverse experienced spontaneous fertilization. Somewhere, a desert became green. A dead planet started the birth of its first amoebas.

Life suddenly had meaning again. The Fallen gave his last few pounds of effort, before ultimately slumping in an expended pile beneath her.

All at once, it came to a grinding halt.

Spyra cried out lastly, draping herself over this wonderful alien savior from sex-heaven as she ground their groins together. She marinated in the afterglow, fascinated with the sensation of their congealed fluids oozing down her thighs. She had temporarily lost the ability to speak. So all she got out was:

"-_fenammphh…_"

-And then she started lapping at his cheek, much like a dog.

The Fallen heaved under her, and let his arms slide off her ass. The dirt was the most comfortable bed right now. He settled in it and became one with it, melting, like ice under the sun.

….And then that was it.

His libido was sated, and so was hers. Days of sexual tension, multiple running battles and near-death experiences. There was no better way to sort out such troubles than blowing it all in a partner's hole.

When Spyra remembered how to form coherent sentences, she had to talk over her own panting. She touched their faces together and laughed quietly.

"…We were supposed to take one of these guys alive…" She giggled, nodding at the battlefield.

"…I know." He giggled right back.

"…._Oooohhh, my achin skull… _Alright, who's the bugga who knocked out my lights? Tato? _Oh, shite! _You're missin your bloody legs! Kalop? _Ahhh! _W-Where's your face?! _Drulop! _The whole troupe's dead- _ohbuggayourecookedtoacrisp-_"

The Fallen and Spyra looked over to see a lone Ape stumble onto his feet, and glance around the chaos in a complete stupor.

Palmet staggered drunkenly, his eyes fell on the coupling of man and dragon, he froze, and the entire left side of his face twitched.

"…H-Hello there." The Ape waved cheaply. "I hope I ain't interruptin anything… _sensual._"

* * *

{🐉}


	17. Chapter 16 - Lines Blurry

**Dragon(s)layer**

**16**

* * *

**Lines Blurry**

* * *

"There isn't anything wrong with admitting that you want to stay."

There were two of him again. It had only been a matter of time. His Conscience had probably been chomping at the bit to get ahold of him the first second he could since that little fling with Spyra.

"Isn't there really? I have other responsibilities to other people." The Fallen shook his head, dumping the bucket over himself with an echoing splash. After puffing drops from his lips, he continued. "This was done on purpose. While I highly doubt Malefora and her Dark Army were part of our enemies' plans, attempting to stick us in our own personal nirvana was certainly the intent."

"Oh I know, but, if you decided at any one moment to walk away from your old life and start anew here, what would really be so horrible about that?" Conscience was relentless as he sat on one of the shore rocks, grinning mockingly at his host over the amber water. "The only reason you promised anyone in the past anything was because you were forced to in the moment! It's all been circumstance and desperation. Even these _pacts_ you've bound yourself to over Nasu and Leha. The rest of their people hate you."

The Fallen paused as he lifted the sponge to his arm. The river babbled in a whisper around him as he thought over what his own mind was telling him.

Had it really reached that point? That he was starving himself of purpose for other beings that weren't even in the same fold of reality?

He was a portaljumper. That was supposed to be part of the risk that came with the occupation. His job wasn't to be a transdimensional immigrant, but a _traveler._ The sights weren't supposed to stop, and what with the battle developing with his enemies outside of Spyra's World, could he really live with himself abandoning all of that and just staying here?

And most of all, why was his Conscience trying to convince him to do exactly that?

"By the way! You never told me how it was." Conscience kicked his legs playfully. "How _tight_ was the magnificent durg-puss?"

"…Are you serious? You're… you're _me._" The Fallen paused.

"I still want details."

"Actually… I think I need someone of flesh and blood to talk to now." The Fallen said, etching away the dried blood and dirt as reams of soap fell down and into the water. Conscience was frozen for a second, like someone had conjured a remote from their ass and slapped the pause button.

As spontaneously as ever, the duplicate leaped into motion with a clap of his hands.

"Alright there, crusader, I won't keep you." Conscience slipped off the rock and landed in the water himself, submerging up to the knees with a childish snicker. "I'm just trying to remind you that it's all about choice! Everything's under your control. Think about it."

"Brain telling you to think? That's… a paradox, I'm pretty sure…" He uttered, his head suddenly hurting.

"You mumble to yourself a lot." –Said a third voice.

The Fallen glanced over at Spyra, seeing the purple dragon smile at him. He laughed at her in turn, taking glee in seeing that hot blush make itself known on her snout.

"What's so funny?" She shuffled closer and hip-bumped him.

"You look like the abominable snow dragon."

Spyra was drenched in soap suds. Mountains of bubbles created white foam all down her azure tinted body. When her wings flexed, little snowflakes of suds rained down everywhere, and the bubble-mounds ridging down her spiked back jostled with her laughter.

She splashed him with amber water and returned to sitting on her haunches as she scrubbed.

"I'd rather be that than a hideous swamp gal." She spiraled another sponge over her paw wrist. "It's a great thing my mad charismatic badassery got me on Ignitia's good side. I didn't think she'd give us the soap bars any other way."

_With how that dragoness was crinkling her nose, we probably could've cowed her into it, just because of how bad we stunk,_ the Fallen thought.

Days of traveling, camping in caves and groves and fighting had taken their toll. He and the purple beastess had reeked by the time they got back from their excursion. When they had first found the River of Amber, they'd been able to water-wash, but without soap, getting all the matted sweat, dried blood and grime out had been impossible.

As it happened, Spyra wasn't the only dragon who had a self-appearance complex. Turns out it was pretty common of her kind here to keep up with an extraordinarily high level of personal grooming. Dragons were like that everywhere, mostly. The Fallen felt himself sinking into a pattern of familiarity, and this world was becoming a little less foreign every day.

"When I was a hatchling, Cometcu and Lightnux had the village help in building me a tub out of wood cuttings. It was like, this big." Spyra demonstrated with her paws in a loop, sending sud-flakes falling everywhere. "And they used to have to help me scrub. It felt weird, having two little people flitter around and rub all over me. I guess I was tiny, so privacy didn't really matter."

"Someone loved bath-time, I'm imagining." The Fallen leaned down and started to use his nails to work in the suds down her back. Spyra smiled with a satisfied hum and leaned against his legs as he worked. "Dragonflies have soap?"

"Funny thing about that… Imagine having to bathe a _giant._" Spyra held up a paw and made a pinching motion with her talons. "The whole village didn't have soap, for like, a _week._ They had to ramp up making it. Basically, once I hatched, the soapmakers had orders to fill for an entire second village. I went through soap like it was goin' out of style."

"It explains why your scales are so pretty all the time." He observed, using water in his palms to slide some of the soap off.

"Where's flattery gonna' get you after I already let you under my tail?" Spyra giggled. "I was kinda' afraid fucking with you would make things awkward, but this is… this is pretty nice. I'm not complaining. Now I get a bath-time partner."

Spyra sighed as he rubbed down her hips for longer than necessary. Her scales had a nice sheen, now that all the battle-fatigue was running away downstream.

"Ya don't mind if I drabble a bit while you're preoccupied."

"Shoot." He started scooping up water and rinsing the lather off. She was an amethyst core slowly being revealed by slithering trails of white suds sloping down her flanks.

"It's hard to be who you are when you're in such an enclosed little space of people. I ain't one to look a gift horse in the mouth or nothin', but I'm still kind of wondering half the time when I'm going to wake up and realize that life doesn't really work like this. Every time I get up now, it's like the dream isn't ending, and I'm getting a bit of vertigo, past-tense. It shakes up everything I understand.

"Up until now I never decided what I wanted to do with my life, and nobody besides two or three dragonflies were ever really interested in what I had to say. What really is there for me without you showing up with a dangerous mission and all the risk around it? This swamp is fun, and it's a big place, but I've explored so much of it that I'm… _tired,_ not physically, I mean.

"I know my parents love me like my egg was theirs, and I know they're probably distraught right now wondering where I am, worrying, fearing the worst that could've happened. I'm wondering myself: how can I tell them that nearly dying has opened my eyes to a whole new aspect of life? That it's introduced to me the idea of really being a _dragon,_ unlocking my elemental ability, my _thirst_ for fighting and growing to be smarter.

"…When you fell, you told me; _it isn't your problem,_ and I get it, dude, you're a complicated kind of guy. I get now that there are things at work here that could end me if I got close. But would it shock you if I said right now that I didn't care? And that I didn't foresee myself changing from that at all even with more experience?

"My old life was empty. I'd risk dying to keep what I found, like a true dragoness hoarding her treasure. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I want to believe my treasure that I've found is…. kinda' _you,_ a-and… and shit…"

Spyra clammed up for a second. The Fallen alleviated by finishing off her haunches, and subtly craning over to the front of her body. He ran his hands down the soft, golden plates of her breast, and kissed her on the purple cheek.

"I like you too. Cheese and all." He sniggered.

"You're not a romantic type, aren'tchya?"

"Not in the slightest. I'll woo you, don't mistake me, but once you ask for roses? No, I normally gift my women stuff a lot more complex than that."

"Gimme' an example."

"I'll show you one," He gripped her plump backside and squeezed, making her gasp and press into him with a lurid look in her eye. The dragoness showed him her teeth and tried to crane her wings around his torso. A constriction around his leg told him where her tail had gone. "but there's a war in the way, I'm afraid."

"…I-I can wait." Spyra nuzzled the back of her head into him, water plopping as she instinctually spread her rear legs and wedged his thigh into the crevice under her tail. He grunted, the dragoness melting with an expression of frowning lust as she wiggled over him. "…_Lemme' get another taste of _human_, stud. Just for kicks._"

He obliged her. Probably at risk of getting seen by literally anyone inside the temple, or anything wandering in the surrounding area.

He was too blinded by lust-haze to even give a shit.

How could one deny hot, literally golden-rimmed durg-pussy?

As wet as they were, Spyra's bubbly backside flopped against his glistening hips as he drove into her from behind, a hand steadying the back of her tail almost painfully as he peeled it forward and draped it past her wing. The Fallen turned their copulation into a duel against _himself_ of all things.

How long could he keep his cool before the inner-animal drove him to relentless abandon this time?

It lasted a little while, the happy dragoness growling and yelping as her human drilled her into the pond floor. Luckily, the water was shallow enough that there wasn't any risk of her submerging her own head. The water was up to her chin, and it caught the heavy dollops of drool swinging around from the tip of her long tongue as it drained into the surf like a slippery eel.

"_-Y-Y'know, a-alien man- _Oh~! –_if we're gonna' keep this up, w-we're gonna' have to determine who's on the dominant side of this little- _Ah~! _–thing…_"

He answered her by gritting his teeth, letting go of her tail and gripping her purple hips. The dragoness moaned in one long note when he started to piston so hard into her cunt that her cheeks wobbled. Spyra dug her paws into the shallow bed of rocks on the pond floor in agony, looking past her wing at him.

_I'm the dominant one, _she could practically see written on his concentrative face as he screwed her.

Two could play at that game.

"-_That's right, you dirty little monkey, fuck your dragon._" She moaned to him, giving the most pleading expression she could think of, remembering years of practice of begging for what she wanted to manipulate Cometcu when she was a hatchling.

_Please, can I have one more sweet?_

_Please, can I go out after dark?_

-Usual questions for a hatchling. At least Spyra liked to believe.

_This _kind of begging on the other claw…

"_Breed your dragon~! Stuff me full of your whelps…~_" She sang, grinning in knowing as she turned away from him and let him have his way with her. The Fallen growled and started hammering her even harder, his skin clapping against her scaly hide with fervor. "_…Fallen…~_"

She wouldn't dare. Not again.

"…_Oooohhhh, Fallen…~ …Gimme' it… Give momma-Spyra your hatchlings…~_"

Fuck.

His hips started to burn as he rode the conjugal train to the very limits.

Was it possible to break bones doing these kinds of things?

"…_Yes, yes-! Ooooh, fuck-!_" Spyra squeaked, and then, in a very assured, sultry voice, she purred: "_Spurt in your dragoness' egg-hole…~_"

Son of a-

The world went white. Somehow, this climax felt even harder than the first one at the battlefield...

-She was still laughing at him long after he dismounted her and begrudgingly resumed their bath, now set back to a certain degree by their activities.

"You sounded like a dying elk." She giggled. "Is that your usual idea of _wooing_ females? _AwwOOOoonaAAaaagaauUUU~!_" She mimicked, whale-like.

"…_Shut up._" He quietly mumbled, suddenly feeling sheepish as he scrubbed his dick free of her essence and his own.

Damn that dirty talk she did.

It was a weapon, just as much as her talons and her fire breath and this electricity thing she'd been rocking. He'd have to be on his guard much more.

"…There's so much that I wanna' talk with you about." Spyra resumed pleasant conversation as he knelt and took his attention to her underside, washing away any leftover evidence of their rutting. She bit her chop as the human lifted her tail and worked out the suds. She loved his fingers. They were so soft and much more delicate than her talons. They found her more sensitive regions just like before, though he was tame this time around and just focused on bathing her.

"So talk." He said, still sounding a little defeated.

"…Well, like…" Spyra craned her neck back and pressed her snout into his chest, inhaling the new soapy scent rising off his clean skin. "…_how was it?_"

"How was what?"

"_Me?_ How was I?" The dragon chirped, her nerves making her fidget under the water. "I don't have a whole rush of experience to work off, kinda' being new to this whole _mating_ thing… So was it… y'know, _nice?_"

"…..."

"Oh don't be such a baby, _putting aside_ me showing you up like a whale interpreter."

"…Did _you_ like it?"

"Fuck yeah, I haven't cum that hard around my own paws ever."

"Then it was nice. I'd never pass it up myself, even when you tease." The Fallen held aloft one of her feet as he carefully worked her onto her back. He scrubbed her taloned toes as Spyra giggled and spread her legs in the surf. "You into foot massages?"

"Never had one before now either." She grinned, looking off at the steps of the Dragon Temple looming just nearby the grove. "…I thought _you_ killed more of those Bulb Spiders than I did, shouldn't I be rubbing you?"

"I'll admit defeat, just like at the spar." He shrugged, working out knots in her scaly, leather pads. Spyra hummed in approval and spread her wings to float out like lily-pads in the amber surf around her. "What else is on your mind? Besides the war."

"Cynder's tower, how we're gonna' stop her, how my village is doing, how worried Cometcu and Lightnux and Firefly are and-" Spyra blushed when she realized her own tumble. She used her horns to keep her muzzle propped out of the waterline and tried again. "…what I'm gonna' do with _you_."

"You don't have to feel awkward asking for sex again, that's for sure." He wriggled her larger toes with his thumbs. "Your feet are adorable."

"_Rawr~._" She teased, making a swiping motion with her other foot at him. "Weapons: everythin' on me."

She felt different after the last few fights. Killing giant bugs and Toadworts throughout her young life had felt too much like pest control.

But now, Spyra had killed _people._ Apes! No matter how barbaric and stupid they were, they were the first sentient beings she had ended in numbers. Tens and tens of them, garnered through all the patrols her and the Fallen had massacred to get to the Temple, and now from the battle in the clearing earlier.

It didn't necessarily bother her- her morals were always pretty up for consideration, based off her own opinion anyhow –it actually felt good. It was an accomplishment. She'd beaten other people in combat, several times. She was pretty high on a cloud right now.

_I even have an alien giving me a foot massage. Just call me Queen Spyra._

They chatted absentmindedly throughout the rest of their time in the reservoir, the runoff waterfall muttering in the backdrop, and their only company being the large dragon statue sticking out of the pond's center.

Spyra did most of the talking. She was ravenous, chatting off his ear about anything and everything, probably more than she'd ever talked to her own adoptive family. Plants she knew how to identify around the swamp, pranks her and Firefly had played on other dragonflies back home, her belief that the Shrine of the Mayfly was haunted, and her expectations of other dragons she'd had as a hatchling.

She told him about the Moon Trees that grew along the rear banks of the nymph pond back home too. Mentioning her brother, though, did also cause her mood to drop somewhat.

"We'll find him. You'll get to say goodbye before you journey north." He reassured her. "I promise I'll get you back to your folks."

Spyra made a splash as she hopped back around and kissed him, holding his shoulders for leverage.

"Ya' ready for some cheese?" The she-dragon chuckled. "You make me feel better about all of this. A-As in, every day is easier with you here…"

The Fallen's smile slowly slipped off his face. Spyra nudged into his lap in the water and sat on him, doting on his chest as she played with her talons under his neck.

"…I'm afraid to ask you." She finally uttered.

"_Afraid?_" He gawked.

"_Terrified,_ actually." Spyra shuddered, draping her wings possessively over his arms. "There's so much goin' on with me right now. I… hurt inside, every day, and I don't know what it feels like to not have that happening to me. I've forgotten how to breathe, even for just a few seconds, and with you, I feel like I can breathe all the time."

The Fallen cupped her cheeks and lifted her head up so they could look at each other.

"You're still a jerk, and all that…" She bopped her snout on his nose and snickered. "…Like, a colossal jerk, but..."

"Uh-huh."

"Stay with me," Spyra clutched him closer in the water, calmly merging their foreheads, and boring into him with her reflective, purple eyes. "-please?"

He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a silent exhale.

Spyra was searching his face for answers, her huge pupils darting around at every little crease or detail. When he still couldn't speak, she sighed through her nose and muzzle-kissed him again, licking his teeth.

**_Bzt~! _**"-_Ow._" –The Fallen jerked back when a little spark of electricity snapped over his lips. Spyra giggled and meshed her head into his neck.

"_Sorry,_ handsome, I'm still learning to control that." She chortled. "I know you talk so much about this whole other world you come from, but… think about it?"

The Fallen hummed and kissed the top of her head.

"At least do me a solid and hold me for a little bit." She tiredly said, dozing against his chest while her body deflated in a sleepy breath. The dragoness slapped her chops and settled in his lap, her wings becoming wet, orange blankets. They listened to the slap of the water. "…_Please don't leave…_"

"I'm not leaving-" The Fallen blinked and looked down. Spyra didn't answer, and a quiet snore let him know why. The dragoness looked like she was in recovery from the worst hangover thought possible, her tongue sticking out a little and limping on his chest like a pink eel.

He stroked her neck and adjusted in the rocky shallows, staring daggers at the overhang of willows and mushrooms penning the little temple's valley via picturesque marshland nature.

Even though this place was a bloody swamp, it still had areas where it was beautiful. His curiosity about other geographies here was only fed more by this.

"I'm not leaving." _Yet._ –But he didn't add that last bit as he whispered to her.

Finding Spyra a place to sleep off the last day was easy. She normally wasn't such a heavy sleeper, but he supposed, once you banged with someone, your body encoded their company with a kind of familiarity that just made it easier to let your guard down around them. He had the experience to back that up, for whatever it was worth now.

He deposited her in a temporary nest he'd gathered of straw and large frond leaves inside the temple. After robing in his ripped, but now cleaned jumpsuit and boots, he was off to walk the hauntingly still halls. The Dragon Temple was actually a lot bigger than it looked like.

Winding halls gave off gothic vibes with a strange, fantastical undertone of mystery. Chandeliers whose black limbs sported glowing chunks of amber gems hung interspersed down the tunnels. Creepers and mushrooms overgrew patches of the cobbled floor, and an overall air of peaceful silence resonated wherever he went.

"Afternoon." He inclined his head.

Torrdonal barked in fright from where he'd been examining an unlit torch on the wall and fell on his own haunches. The poor water dragon watched the human with suspicion in his strolling.

"A-Afternoon…"

The Fallen hummed to himself, impressed. He hadn't expected a response.

Going deeper inside, he eventually found the Egg Chamber, and decided to stop in.

Now Ignitia had already repeated what she had said to Spyra to him, and he admitted that it was a lot to absorb. That was just a piece of the greater puzzle eating up his mind, however.

He lazily trekked over the dais plates and stood in the center of the ancient room, examining the cracked amber sunroof with a thoughtful look. He blinked through the beams of sunlight dappling in through the glass and took a moment to just go over everything that had happened so far.

Apes. Cynder. Swamp. Evil tower. Dragons. Blood. Pain. Lust…

…He should've started making a freakin' checklist.

"Back from your rounds, _Fallen?_"

The human frowned and looked through the archway to see Harad trotting inside the chamber, an austere and constant scowl adorning his snout. The silvery armor covering his body clinked in the quiet din as he trotted closer, spreading his thorny wings, no doubt in an effort to appear domineering.

"Indeed, Captain Harasal." The Fallen smirked. _Asshole._

"It is pronounced _Harad._" Harad frowned, stopping a few feet away from him and sitting. "Why are you here?"

"I needed a minute to myself. I thought you and your squad were getting ready to depart back to Warfang?"

"The _Wingleader_ hasn't humored the idea as I have." Harad's face barely moved when he talked. The Fallen acquainted his appearance in likeness to- ironically –a _rock._ The very thing that matched his Earth Element. "…I'm sure you can appreciate politics, wherever it is you come from."

"Politics: a noise to most, a weapon to few. Most people can't make it both." The Fallen lamented. "I'm probably _too_ familiar with them."

"Fascinating." Harad inched a brow with disinterest. The Fallen matched his expression, realizing a tad too late that he was still in _friendly talker mode,_ something that Spyra had earned the right to see. Harad didn't.

"What do you want?" The Fallen grunted, his words echoing around the chamber.

"To confront you. But as I've observed, you're very quick to let bygones be bygones, so I'm willing to let it slip that you tried to feed me an explosive." Harad said matter-of-factly. "We were both doing our jobs."

"At least you assume something correctly." The human crossed his arms. "Go on."

"Your pledge earlier this afternoon worries me. I see what you are doing to that hen." Harad darkly flexed his wings, his browline lowered to impossibly make his features look even more aggressive. "You've proven extreme capability in combat. If it weren't the case, I'm sure you're aware that I would've _dealt with you_ to expediate our leaving this marshland hell."

"Because you're such a charitable kind of guy, right? Is there a point to this, or did you come in here to stamp and whine like a toddler?" The Fallen shrugged. "Man to man, Halal; just say you don't take losing well."

"It's _Harad._" The Captain snarled.

"Look, you can continue checking over your shoulder for something that isn't there, or you can get down to brass tacks. So let me remind you of something; I haven't even been here for more than a week, and even I can see that your people are losing the fight. You're outnumbered in the field, and your desperation to keep Malefora's forces off your beaches, has left you blinded to the rest of the world.

"While you've all been fooling yourselves with a false sense of security, the Dark Army has been transforming what were previously worthless territories into fortified manufacturing plants and staging grounds. All of that, I have no doubt is partly because of these _politics_ you probably yank out your ass daily as an excuse.

"Do I have ulterior motives? Ones you don't understand? Certainly. Of course I do. I'm an offworld traveler from a place beyond your scope as a little, mortal, green lizard with wings. I'm not going to insult your intelligence by lying about that.

"What I _will_ answer truthfully; is that currently, my goals intersect with yours, in that our working together gets us both what we want. Spoil for your fight with me again, Captain, but don't expect me to betray Spyra, or _that hen_ as you call her. She has my loyalty. She wants to go to Warfang? She wants to kick Cynder and her Apes out of this swamp? Then that's my war."

Harad was livid. The big green dragon looked like he was about to pounce.

"Ignitia wants to know why there's a monkey tied up on the observer plat!"

Both Harad and the Fallen glanced over to see Morinth standing in the archway this time. Her emerald eyes briefly flickered over Harad and locked on the Fallen.

"What am I telling mam, sir? Fallen?"

"That was the _second_ reason I came in here." Harad growled, baring his fangs at the human. "Your excursion proved fruitful?"

"Oh yes, we've certainly made progress, in ways others haven't attempted or just were too shorthanded to try." The Fallen looped around him and marched dutifully for the arch.

"You are a quip-mouthed bastard." Harad slammed his tail into the floor.

"I'll check you later, sweety, leave your number at the desk and I'll get right back to you." The Fallen presented two middle-digits (purely because he knew Harad didn't understand the gesture) and backtracked into the hall beside Morinth, who looked eager to be away from her fuming officer.

The Fallen laughed quietly and kicked a rock down the hallway, looking over at the shorter, dark dragoness as the latter struggled to keep her gaze off him and on the floor.

"Hey," He nodded. Morinth jumped a bit with a squeak and looked up at him with wide eyes. "what's up?"

"N-Nothing." Morinth squeaked, hugging her wings to herself closer. "I was sent by mam to find you and the Captain about-"

"You said your name is Morinth, correct?"

"…Yes. I am Morinth, soldier of Warfang." Morinth sternly responded, turning her nose up at him as she corrected her walk to look more official. "_You_ are the alien creature who nearly killed my CO and wiped out half my squad. Regulations state that you are an armed and dangerous threat, and that we merely enjoy a temporary truce."

"I just pledged service to your city a few hours ago. Why is that not enough for any of you people?" The Fallen shrugged, sighing adamantly. "I know I stuffed a stick of dynamite in your Captain's throat and wished him dead, but the rejection is a little extreme."

Morinth broke her façade as she bit her chops and struggled to suppress the beginnings of a snicker.

"W-We can't be too careful around suspicious and violent strangers." Her muzzle twitched and her eyes were very wide as she stared ahead.

"You have really pretty eyes."

Morinth cringed and glanced at him with disgust.

"You were getting somewhere, and you decide to follow up with cheap flattery?" She scoffed.

"Actually I was just making sure you weren't a dumb bimbo spreading her legs for every suitor." He scratched his chin. Morinth gasped and a fresh blush was shown through the black scales covering her snout. "-_I'm kidding._ Well, kind of kidding. I prefer a female who can think for herself and snap just as poor an insult as she's dealt. Hit me."

"A jar of my own talon-clippings would make a better suitor than your very rude person." Morinth harrumphed.

"_Ha,_ there it is. Alright, I've gotten a green light."

"Do you talk to females of your own kind like this?"

"I wouldn't know, I haven't seen any in months. Besides, I prefer stepping outside my own species for such kinds of things." He said. Morinth was blushing harder, and gazed at him with a taken-aback expression. "There aren't people here who are a little weird?"

"I-I do not frown upon diversity." Morinth quickly stuttered. "If you're seeking… whatever it is you're seeking from _me,_ then you'll have to look elsewhere, I am spoken for."

"Mm, no doubt by that white girlie, what's her name? Taliopia?"

"Indeed. There's something in common we share- the _only_ thing –we both seek the same gender for our partners."

"I am the last guy you'll find judgment for in anything." The Fallen held his hands up as they rounded a corner. "I'm happy for the two of you."

"Thank you." She puffed through her muzzle with disinterest.

"So how long have you been in the army?"

"Five years."

"Five years? Shit. Did you join right from the nursery or something?"

"You're quite the talker. Let me guess; you're too polite to assume a woman's age?" Morinth daggered a brow, smiling.

"Right on the mark with that one. May the lady tell me?"

"Twenty five, if you must know. Is that the age of that feisty dragoness you found in the swamps? The _purple one?_ I'm betting you did not realize her significance to everything that's going on…"

"She's close to it, she doesn't know herself. She's been raised by dragonflies." He said, ignoring Morinth's shocked blink to him. "And her name's Spyra, Harad refuses to use it, I'd appreciate if you didn't follow his example. By the way, you look younger."

"I thought we'd established I'm beyond cheap flattery." Morinth shook her head.

"But _not_ beyond decent conversation. I'd like to introduce myself properly to you, if you'd allow me."

Morinth laughed nervously and stopped in her tracks, marveling at the human's anatomy as he fell to a knee, and offered his hand to her politely.

"I am known as the Fallen here, my title is my name, for I am nameless. And you are?"

"Morinth." She said stuffily. He cleared his throat and eyed her paws. The dragoness looked down at them herself, and awkwardly placed one in his fingers. The Fallen gently lifted it to his mouth and kissed it at the wrist. The reaction was immediate. Morinth shuddered, gasped, and tore her paw away quickly, trembling.

"It's a beautiful name for a beautiful dragoness. You must excuse my earlier behavior, but I cannot deny in informing you; you are prime material. My inner knight flutters at the fullness of your tail, and the rife inner velvetine feminity you carry. I would plunder your hoard any day, wingmaiden of Warfang." The Fallen paused to watch Morinth's jaw flap like a fish's, before he ended it with: "Maybe one evening you'll let me breed you a better opinion of my golden sword."

**_Fwoofff~! _**–there went the wings. Morinth froze, her pupils shrinking to the size of peas, and then she exploded.

"_Gah~! Go away! Goawaygoawaygoaway-! Talliiiiii~! W-Where are you?! I neeeeed yoooouuuu-~!_" Morinth danced away in horror, her voice slipping inadvertanely into its usual singsongedness.

She shielded the mad blush on her face with her wings and dashed on her hind-legs down another hall path. The Fallen watched her go, chuckled manically and continued on his way, alone.

* * *

{🐉}

"…I don't mean to trouble ya there, lass, but ya see, it's my first time bein captured and all, and I've got an orrible itch that's rakin my bum. It always happens when I lose my nerve. My arse starts ticklin and I start to stammer over my gobbin words. I know ya won't untie me, b-but… aw, nuts abou wot I'm askin… c-could… could ya scratch me? _P-Please? _Just a little around the rim of my leg right ere."

Palmet must have been trying to pull off his best doe-eyes for the mighty flame dragoness.

Instead of appearing cute, he resembled a braying donkey. An inbred, braying donkey that had been run over by a truck and resurrected by an errant Necromancer for use as a footstool, latrine jockey and occasional beating stick dummy.

Ignitia cringed and turned away from the hideous Ape, refocusing her attention on the horizon past the railings.

The Southern Swamps extended as far as the eye could see in every direction from up here, on the temple's cliff face topping observation plat. Connected to the elemental training room, a brief flight of arched stairs led to this circular outcrop. In earlier ages, this place would've been serene.

She supposed it still was, but now fungus cloisters overgrew the stone flooring, cracks and damage marred everything, and half the railing stakes on the plat's upper bar ring were missing.

A little breeze whistled faintly overhead. Ignitia ignored the pained mewls of Palmet as he struggled against the rope the Fallen had tied him up in. Her eyes displayed an emotion she'd been resonating all too frequently the last few years:

_Sadness._

Ignitia was sad about everything really. The spiraling depression had started after the destruction of the very temple she was currently standing in. All of those eggs…

_Spyra's egg…_

The Guardian stroked her chin fin and sighed.

It was hard being a female to begin with. Being a female with authority was doubly biting, and made everyday interactions just a tad more difficult than they should've been. The unmistakeable voice in the back of one's horns reminding them of something aloof and different on the air everytime they worked in a team.

Above all that, the knowledge of having an egg to call your own, and losing it.

Ignitia remembered long evenings spent in inconsolable tears. Thirty years in the Realms, and not another living being had ever witnessed her crying. She had refused to make herself that vulnerable for _anyone,_ not even the other Guardians.

Not even for Volteera! And Volteera was the one who had come up with '_Study-Buddy' _events at the Academy for students. Ignitia had never told anyone that the lonely lightning dragoness had only tortured every dragon there in an effort to try and force _someone_ into conversations with her, during what were supposed to be schooling hours.

That was the unfortunate mechanic with the Guardians. They were sworn to the teaching of elements to all dragon younglings of Warfang, living almost like monks, forced into abstinence, the banishment of recreational substances, and the _training…_

The constant, constant, _constant_ god damned training.

Ignitia had been sharpening her abilities to manipulate fire for over twenty five years. Straight from the nursery, it felt like. Everything had always had its place, and a day of her life hadn't passed without rigid structure and lectured discipline. She had barely known her own father, hated her mother, and had mostly been raised by her paternal granddragons before she had joined the pseudo-religious organization of dragons convening at the Shrines of Warfang. There she had tirelessly pursued the study of flame, her biological element, alongside twenty six other aspirants, three of them being a very young Volteera, Cyrila and Terradora.

Once, they had been like sisters, the four of them.

Now, times were very different.

Cyrila and Volteera were still relatively close to her. Though the latter was poorer at shielding her emotions on a day to day basis. Ignitia had inner pain herself, but Volteera was the one who had been interred in the hospital wing three years ago for that '_accident' _that had happened with the banner pole outside during lunch hour.

"…Unaminously, fantastically and exuberantly fastidious, our occupations are in these halls!" She had said, Ignitia sitting on her haunches by the nest side in the medical chamber. "Marginally and greatly of the tongue speaking however; things are so restrictive, and tight, and small and-"

"_Get to the point, Volteera._"

Ignitia mouthed the words as she sat on the balcony, and smiled, still, sadly.

Volteera had paused for a very long while, her beautiful, spined and yellow face caught in a constant and manically chipper grin. But the dragoness' amber eyes were the things that were always wailing. Ignitia could hurt herself for not ever seeing it sooner.

"…_b-but,_ with all the marvelous and boisterous and wonderful things we are gifted, that _I_ am gifted to live and have known, I must observe the shocking and drastically low number of other dragons that wish to listen." Volteera's chin quivered. She had looked to Ignitia for help, and Ignitia had brushed her away.

"_We'll get your wings wide and you'll be back on your paws before you know it. You should be more careful, sister._"

"…Yes, indeed, quite, indubitably so… I shall persevere," Volteera- still smiling –had stared at a wall for what felt like hours. "…I shall regain my footing, to live a life of long prosperity, and of remaining unbearable to any outside those forced to keep my company in any walls I might dwell within."

Ignitia huffed. Palmet, in the background, was grunting in effort as he fought the bonds.

"I fink these binds are cutting off circulation." He stammered. "My paws are turning bluer than those berries Glomrok ate when he keeled over and vomited his own intestines up at lunch yesterday."

Ignitia rolled her red eyes.

Good, maybe they'd fall off. Fucking Ape. It was because of them this place was like this.

It was because of them that Ignitia had become obsessed with this temple, constantly journeying to it to recover records, even shards of long smashed eggs.

Trivial crap that no dragon gave a fucking rat's ass about.

All for what?

To relive some kind of hard-tacked glory days that only she and handful of females in the city could barely remember?

So she could relive the memory of what successful motherhood felt like? All in her bids to run away from her own life and push away her friends that desperately needed her help.

Like Volteera.

Nobody else would help that hen.

Terradora was too busy trying to be the general in the army she'd always wanted to be. The three of them hardly knew her anymore.

And Cyrila hated Volteera. Ignitia doubted that even if Cyrila wasn't such a pompous bitch on the worst of days, that the icy hearted dragoness of the glaciers could be bothered to understand a deeper reason for Volteera's mouth anyhow.

Truth be told, there was a lot of hatred going on.

Ignitia hated Terradora for her choice to vanish. Ignitia hated Cyrila for hating Volteera. Ignitia hated Volteera for being a scatterbrain.

She hated herself for wasting her own life and losing all of those eggs. What right did she have, advocating for this long blasted thing called _hope_ to other dragons when she herself had none?

What did one do when the world left them behind? When you had no one who could hear your screams and understand what they were for.

God damn it.

Ignitia decided that if she got back to Warfang, and the war slowed down, she'd find Volteera, and she would embrace her as a sister.

Cyrila…

She'd have to think about how to approach that.

"_Bugga! _I can't scratch my fleas… Wait a gob, who's dat over the-_GAH! _N-Not you! _Leave me alone!_" Palmet shrieked, rolling and wiggling away on the floor like a panicked worm. "I won't letchya take me! I'll wiggle off the side! I'll doom myself to preserve the Dark Master's name!"

"…You can't climb over the short wall." Ignitia gawked quietly, boredly watching the Ape squirm and inchworm across the cobble on his chin and belly towards the rim of the plat. "Oh, forget it."

"I appreciate you keeping my prisoner company, but it wasn't needed." The Fallen finished jogging down the stairs and stood before her under the last arch. Ignitia turned to him and examined him from head to toe.

_Curious creature, hairless too. I wonder where he comes from where people don't require protection from any sort of elements._

"_Ah,_ Fallen, just the alien organism I was looking for. _Uhm,_" Ignitia ran out of things to say. So, she smiled pleasantly, as if she was offering the Fallen a plate of cookies, and pointed to the wriggling Ape on the floor. "Explain."

"He's our ticket inside Cynder's tower." The Fallen grinned back, stepping over.

"Oh, that is quite a marvelous idea." Ignitia politely sat and watched with a raised brow. "If only so many other dragon officers had not thought the same thing and stood where you are to this date…"

"You didn't strike me as a dragoness who liked sarcasm." He pointed at her, and bent down to roughly snatch Palmet's shoulders. "_Sit up you fuckin' furry freak._"

"_I surrender! I'm unarmed and subdued! _Don't you lot have some kinda laws for the treatment of prisoners of war? I'm protected by the rights of the international court! Freedom of speech! Freedom of speech! Freedom of-"

"_Shut the fuck up._" The Fallen decked Palmet across the jaw and sent spittle flying. The Ape howled in pain and slumped onto his side. The Fallen placed a kick in his gut and made the Ape curl in on himself like a dying spider.

"-_Ave mercy!_"

"That doesn't sound like a word in your kind's vocabularly. Say I'm wrong?" The Fallen gripped the Ape's scruff and hauled him onto his ass.

"Well, not exactly, no." Palmet cringed.

"You people like sandwiches though, right?"

"_Ooo! _Sure, pork and ant-gut sandwiches were the rage with the lads back at the tribe in-"

"_Here's a sandwich for you._" The Fallen punched Palmet right between the eyes, causing a loud **_thwack~! _**–to echo around the plat. Palmet squealed and collapsed in a heap. "I should rip your legs off for what you and your little friends tried to pull on me and my dragon…"

"I hardly see how this is helping anyone. Unless you captured one of them purely to release some pent-in rage." Ignitia called over, unimpressed. "And who are you speaking of as _your dragon?_ Do you mean Spyra? So you've claimed her as property now, haven't you?"

"It's-!" The Fallen spun on her and then paused. "…it's…. _complicated._"

"Well with how adamantly she speaks of you, I could not doubt it." Ignitia trotted closer, and the Fallen blinked when the distinct scent of cinnamon wafted in his nose. "Is this what you and her did when you left earlier? You hunted down a rogue, lone Ape and captured him? What if you were seen?"

"_Seen?!_ _Lone Ape?!_" Palmet hacked on the ground. "These crazy loons attacked my whole _unit_ in broad bloody daylight! And that was before poor Drulop called in for reinforcements from Sylak's boys and their Dreadwing! I fink his name was Cuddles. The lads loved that one, he was a good boy, only ate one or two handlers before they got him good and in order, and you bastards broke his face on a tree ya did! Shame on you! Sham-"

The Fallen snarled and kicked him in the head to shut him up.

"A _Dreadwing?!_" Ignitia gasped. "You and Spyra were attacked by a _Dreadwing?_"

"A Dreadwing and a whole cadre of _them._" The Fallen pointed at Palmet. "What do you want me to do, lie to you? Just think, you were so worried about how I treat Spyra, well there it is; I fought an army to keep her safe, and we _won._ I'd love to see any of your soldiers do that in a day's work…"

"You're wreckless and irresponsible." Ignitia snapped.

"_We both are! _Why do you think I get along with her so well enough that she let me roll her over and stick my-" The Fallen slapped a hand over his mouth and waved a palm at her. "-_Just forget it._ Let me do my work so I can win your war, and we'll be done with it."

"Do I get a say in this?" Palmet's tail twitched.

"The only thing you're going to tell me is how to breach the defenses of Cynder's tower. _Talk!_" The Fallen kicked the Ape onto his back, whipped out the machete blade on his hip, and pressed the tip onto Palmet's paw. "Tell me what I want to know! Or I'll start slicing your fingers off one by one, you piece of shit."

"-I don't know nothing about that tower! I'm just an expendable, like the rest of the lads! Good in a bunch and on the road in a mob! That's my job!"

The Fallen snarled like a dog and grabbed Palmet's mane. He lifted the Ape to his knees and then slammed him face-first back onto the floor, nearly dislodging a tooth.

The Fallen knelt and smashed a knee into the side of Palmet's long face, causing him to choke out and start wriggling. He used the machete to flatten out the right set of his paw fingers, and then rotated the blade's point to run right along the creases. He started to press downwards.

"_No! STOP!_" Palmet screamed, muffled by the human's knee. "_I'lltalk! I'LLTALK!_"

"Tell me how to get in that fucking tower. _Right. NOW. _Or I swear to god I will kill you. Do you hear me? _I will kill you slowly._" The Fallen drove his knee in with a growl.

"_I never even liked the Mistress anyway! _She's so stuck up and- and _nasty! _She swats us around like we're cat toys and uses us like minefield clearers without the shovels! Apes are bettah than dat! We weren't meant to be servin anyone but ourselves anyway! You want in that tower? That orrible, stankin tower? _Fine! _I'll tell ya everything I know! _JUST DON'T URT ME!_"

"And thou'st doubted me." The Fallen chuckled, going to nudge Ignitia, and frowning when she stepped back and avoided any form of contact. "All you need is one weak link."

"Or a gullable interrogator." Ignitia narrowed an eye.

"While true, _this_ interrogator isn't about to let you all down." He said. "You know, one time, I had to strongarm the location of a hidden fortress out of a guy named Ulas Dellecamee. He was a fanatic who would've sooner died than betray his own brothers. Me and my allies had been engaged in a guerilla campaign for over three months in a limestack mountain range that they called '_Ai'Nussa Toco'nom, _it means _Blood Peaks of Pain _in their dialect. I saw a lot of people die, heavy stealth equipment with no overhead or strategic support was common. But I got that fortress out of Ulas' head. It just took some unexampled solutions to pry it from him like a hot coal out of the brazier, but I did it."

"How long did it take you to break such a foe?" Ignitia smiled patronizingly; not believing a word.

"Two weeks." The Fallen's expression dropped, and he paused over Palmet's form with a sudden darkness shrouding his eyes. He blinked and stepped around to his other side. "Listen, I'm not trying to boast. But I've… hurt people before. I've hurt them very badly, and I've struggled with myself to understand that I've gotten very good at it. Just let me do my job."

Palmet was a chatterbox for a prisoner. The Fallen was thankful, only because it wasn't a second Ulas.

"The inside of the tower is sealed off, cept for the entrance gates. That was one of the furst things the first Apes who took the place did, I hear. They flattened out this uge flight of drag steps ta make a ramp for all the war wagons and supply trains. That's how the Mistress gets her Mana crystal-fingies so easily inside. Most of the boys watching the place answa to Chieftain Visigoth, just like me! But Chieftain Jute is the one who handles transport, he has his Dreadywings carry the shipments ovva the oceans to the _Bad Place_. Sometimes riders don't come back." Palmet explained, rocking absentmindedly as he sat tied on the floor.

The Fallen listened to him whilst in a constant pace, his eyes locked on the mushroom-grown horizon.

Just faintly, one could see the very top of a tower far off in the backdrop, behind reams of tightly interwoven, and hauntingly dark mushroom forests that he knew was the Funguswood itself.

Ignitia didn't excuse herself, and she too listened to the Ape's tales. The Fallen at one point, as he sat on the shortwall and kicked his legs over the terrible drop off the plat's rim, turned and noticed her scribbling notes with a charcoal stick and a parchment booklet from her hip pouch.

"The Mistress keeps the place locked up like a jewelreez box. Only one way in and out from the ground, and dat be the front gates. We rigged Spika Cannons along the rims of the step flight, and Visigoth's got a Warr-Wagon sitting somewhere inside, but he doesn't tell anyone wher. Other den dat, there's the tribes' camps and the weapon forges takin up most of the centa." By this point, Palmet could almost be construed as casual in his tone, even as he snorted up a ream of blood dribbling down his muzzle from the prior kickings. He was talking on air pretty much, examining the look of his own toes wriggling past the rope constricting his chest. "The Mistress has got a purtey little observatory on the top, she always sticks up there and rots. She likes to look ovva everyone she does. I always reasoned it had somethin to do with a bad youngin's upbringin, that. Or a superiorness complex."

"Tell me more about this _Bad Place._" The Fallen chucked a rock over the railing and watched it tumble into the swamp below. Ignitia's scribbling ceased, and the fire dragoness looked at the Ape expectantly.

"Dat's where the Dark One lives…" Palmet shuddered. "We're nevva told much about that place. Any Ape armies shipped ovvaseas always end up attackin the drags' coastlines, they nevva go to the _Bad Place._ The Dark Mistress has her own armies to protect her there. We're not allowed, and nobody's signing up! Our Mistress keeps a relic underneath the tower that she uses to talk with the Bad Place, it's a pool or somethin. I ain't evva seen it myself, I only heard some of the slaves being kept down there for cleanin purposes in their hushed whispers. They say the pool talks and the lot."

Ignitia looked thoughtful as she paused before jotting down another line on the fresh page.

"Does this sound like the Dark Continent?" He asked her across the plat.

"It matches the descriptions as well as this creature could recollect." Ignitia nodded thoughtfully. "Tell me, the slaves being kept by Cynder, what are they and how many are there?"

"A buncha dirty Moles them." Palmet paused. "-…_Uh… _N-Now before ya get angry, I only evva heard rumors that drags and Moles were good friends and I ain't assuming nothing-"

"Focus on the question." The Fallen reminded calmly.

"Moles, abou a hundred of em or somefin. The Mistress uses em to clean out the catacomb tunnels underneath the tower, so she can use the chambers as storage cells for all the Mana Crystals, before they're broken up by the same slaves and shipped out on Dreadywing. Other then dat, she uses em to sweep her observatory every now and then and ta fashion fuses for the boom-sticks."

Ignitia was scribbling up a storm again, parchment slipping as she turned pages and started a new text block.

"It's a pain in the tail ta get rid of all the refuse from so many rodent-peepol, ya hear. That's why the offices have the janitas dump all the runoff out the drainage sump at the base of the wall-"

"Tell me about that." The Fallen bolted upright and knelt in front of the Ape, his eyes narrowed. "Drainage sump? Tell me everything about it."

"The bloody ell do ya want to know about where everyone shits for?" Palmet blinked.

The Fallen clenched a fist and the Ape squealed.

"-_Alrightalright! _Jus calm ya gob!"

"Speak plainly."

"The sump's a drainage run, that's off to the east of the main atrium floor! It lets out into a little mushroom grove that the lads call _Shit's Creek!_ There's a bar-cap sealin it off on account of everyone bein afraid of the _Sewer Moana!_" Palmet ranted. "Ya could probably use all your supa-powas you used on my lads to get in through it! _Now jus don't hurt me!_"

Tearing back from his captive, the Fallen turned to start jogging up the steps.

"…_Buggas,_ he's scary…" Palmet shivered, his monkey-tail whipping as he collected himself on the floor. "…Listen, abou that scratch I asked for, miss, I wasn't tryin ta sound suggestive or whatnot-"

Ignitia clapped her little booklet closed and ran on all fours after the Fallen. Palmet blinked as the large gate-doors slammed shut, and his only company was the whistle of a slight breeze this high up.

"…Oi," Palmet daggered his brows, lifted a leg and farted in the cobble. "who knew da enemy was so _rude?_"

* * *

{🐉}


	18. Chapter 17 - Realize, Darkly

**Dragon(s)layer**

**17**

* * *

**Realize, Darkly**

* * *

When she first broke through the shell, she had been blind. All dragonlings were blind when they hatched.

Cynder fumbled out of the ragged trench she'd created and flopped onto a cold floor, her scales (new and soft) itching up a heated storm as she struggled to comprehend everything around her.

Unable to shout, or form sentences, the little reptile was reduced to muted chirps and squeaks. She had no memory of what she looked like back then. But she remembered feeling the stubs that would become her horns, and the nubs she had for feet that pattered around as she rolled and played on the stone.

Most hatchlings were terrified when they first came out of the egg, and were in dire need of a parentdragon to swiftly scoop them up, groom them of amniotic fluid, and comfort them with purrs and rumbles. It was a mother's job, to fawn over her new prodigy, purr for them, heat them with her belly scales and nurse them until sight came.

Cynder never had this. But the nightmare always started with an innocent tract. It was the same every time.

Blind, alone, and oh so tiny, the infant squealed when something rough, cold and metal encapsulated her tiny paws, and lifted her without effort from the ground.

Chains clinked, metal locked. Cynder felt weightless as she was suspended in midair, her stance matching a crucification in form. Her forelegs were out and extended, and her rearpaws hung limply below her.

"**_See._**" Commanded a wraith's voice. "**_Open your eyes and see._**"

Cynder did, her face contorting in horror.

A hatchling's first sights were supposed to be of the things she loved the most. A loving mother, a protective father, a den stocked with food, warm air and treasure with which to roll and play with her siblings in.

Cynder did not have that.

Her first sight was the Pool.

It was a vortex of swirling purple fire and shadow. It resembled the arterial drainage of some inky bloodline, or perhaps just darkness, mottled with sapphires.

Convexity was a fifth element barely understood by most. Cynder herself could not control it to this day. She only knew incantations to use it for summoning her master's attention, and even then, it was only droplets…

The nightmare replayed the past. That little hatchling had been _drowned_ in Convexity. It wasn't just a drop.

Panicked squeaks were met with no mercy as the chains lowered. If Cynder had been old enough then to cry, her tears would've been in freefall. She had no doubt the Convexity would've lapped them up greedily, like a vampire bat sapping blood after a long period of starvation.

Tentacles of terror slurped from the pool and encased her defenseless body. Her very skin felt like someone had set it aflame. Her scales darkened, grew and hardened. Little bones snapped and reformed into stronger, warped and mutated forebears. Infantile squeaks became developed, feminine howls of agony.

Cynder was transformed into what she was. The Terror of the Skies. Cloudripper. And no one could hear her suffer. Malefora had been laughing too loudly the whole time.

Still, the nightmare didn't end. It shifted.

Cynder found herself standing in a dark chamber, the dual Eternal Moons of the world hanging highly over her head, and bathing her in a pristine, deep pink haze.

In her forepaw was a glass sphere, a very delicate thing. Cynder didn't know where it ever came from. It had always just been there.

In the dream, she was smiling sadly at it, wriggling her talons on the sphere, listening to the keratin clink against it silently.

"_Justice." _–Her dreamself said.

Then, she let the sphere fall, and it shattered sharply on the dark floor.

**_Crash~!_**

-Cynder awoke with a horrified cry.

Cold sweat matted her nesting. The dark dragoness heaved as adrenaline bled from her like a melted cancer. She swept her snout around the observatory for a long while and sighed when she realized what had happened.

_Damn it._

Papers riddled with notes and map markers idly ticked and brushed from a breeze blowing through the chamber. They were stacked on little end tables and shelves, with reams of scrolls and books, most of them stolen.

Cynder unfurled from her nesting and started the new day with a brewed cup of tea. There was a cauldron she kept up here for such things, one of the only pleasantries she'd been allowed in her time here. In the wake of the nightmare, Cynder stirred the boiling contents idly, keeping an eye on the twin giant pods sitting in the room's center the whole while.

_Fallen. I wonder how an alien starts the day._

She reviewed her accumulated writings inside her study, teacup in one paw, the other idly flipping to a new page or sheet with every other sip.

If Cynder could've seen herself, she would've been appalled at her appearance. Bags were under her eyes and her cheeks were sunken. She had been getting little sleep, dedicating most of her time to drabbling notes, scouring the swamp from the skies or racing to areas where her patrols disappeared.

None of the prior ever worked out to do anything more than further defeat her.

The patrols did nothing. The swamps were so massive and overgrown that the air was proving more of a hindrance than anything else. She couldn't have spotted the Fallen if he was on fire, jumping and screaming.

_An apt fantasy._

She smiled at that.

Then she frowned.

If he burned, he couldn't….

**_Crsk!_**

-Cynder jolted, her empty cup suddenly shattering in a fist she didn't realize she'd clenched. She ticked her tongue and took the time to procure a fresh cup, newly filled.

She sat back at the table and slapped her chops groggily.

Where had she been?

Oh yes! Going over why those three options had proven to suck.

Flying was out. Next was note-taking, which she supposed worked well to kep her preoccupied, but did jack shit otherwise. She'd written all kinds of personal entries throughout her life due to the lack of people to talk to. Many of those more recent pages had centered around her lack of understanding of the pods in her observatory, the way it had felt when the Fallen had touched her, and her desire to understand his biology.

_In more ways than one- STOP._

Cynder put enough tea in her mouth so that her cheeks bulged before swallowing.

Ah, yes.

Finally, there was sending her armies into the swamp, and basically waiting for someone to die so that she knew where the two of them were, before promptly racing over.

This had only happened a handful of times, though. Most of the time, her patrols would simply _vanish._ A few of them hadn't even turned up as a field of bodies slain with stolen Ape weapons and dragonflame, as they so often did.

When Cynder had heard an errant alarm horn or sentries returned with news, she was quick, and torturous on her wing muscles to get there.

Those all ended with her examining the place for clues, which weren't there, and her stomping around having a hissy conniption.

Cynder's lower jaw trembled.

She never recalled feeling this useless. She'd engaged them_,_ and had either been outpaced, or had fled because she was outnumbered.

If Malefora ever found out… _No._

More distractions were needed.

She sat on her haunches on the plat outside, a fresh clay cup brimmed with scalding tea, sipping its minty contents dryly, her eyes skimming the mushrooms below.

She…. still felt useless. Huh, normally gazing down at the filthy woods put things into perspective.

The Fallen and Spyra were like cockroaches. They struck out and destroyed a unit and then vanished before she could bring the full might of her army against them. Cynder was used to her enemies coming _to_ her, or being really bad at hiding.

Malefora must have known on some level that the Purple Dragoness was here before she had found her outside that cave. Cynder was spotty on a lot of the details of the war predating her conception. She knew that Visigoth had destroyed the Dragon Temple, smashed all the eggs he could get his filthy paws on and had driven the Northern Armies back. Cynder always had her suspicions that her egg had been part of that clutch, that Visigoth had been the one to oversee the ritual of corruption. But Malefora had never admitted it directly. There was little else in explanation. Cynder was no Night Dragon. She was a _half-breed._

Not that it mattered where she had come from. Malefora had said it herself: nature abhorred her existence. She was a breathing crime. If she had parents, they were probably dead anyway.

Fuck them.

Cynder needed nobody in her life.

_Nobody._

She was staring at the pods again when the heavy flap of wings sounded out in the quiet morning air. A Dreadwing landed on the plat with a heave of shrieking breath. Its head was obscured by a snarling, solid metal headdress, and necklaces of ribs and leaf fronds hung from its bristled neck.

The black dragon didn't even flinch when the larger monster hunched its back and screeched at her, altering the course of the steam wafting from her teacup. Cynder glared dejectedly at it, and craned an eye mid-sip to the saddle.

"I fail to remember your steed being so badly mannered." She droned, voice muffled by the clay rim of her cup.

"Aw, it ain't much so, m'lady, Charlee's just excited ta see ya he is! Ain't that right, boy?" Came a gleeful, cockney voice from the beast's back.

_Charlee_ screeched and wriggled his own bristles like a dog shaking water from itself. Cynder growled and her tail thwacked on the cobble in annoyance.

"Your presence is reassuring, Chieftain, but for Ancestors' sakes, silence that wretched thing. I have a headache."

"Aye, as ya say." Chieftain Jute yanked on one of the Dreadwing's horns and snarled into its mane- "_control yerself, boy, or I'll burn ya._"

The steed snorted and lowered its shoulder. The massive Ape, bedecked in furs over his wide shoulders, with tropical-looking fronds hanging off layered necklaces hopped down with a cheery laugh. The flamboyant warlord earned a derisive sneer from her as he exaggerated a step forwards and a theater-esq bow.

"My flights are at ya services, m'lady. We missed ya up north! It's a darn shame that an assault on ye person was what was needed ta bring us down. So, what's all this ruckus I'm hearing about a _hoo-man_ fingie fallen from the sky and kickin Visigoth in the balls?"

Cynder sputtered in her tea a little, quaintly mustering her etiquette to subdue a chuckle. She nodded over her wing at the pods in the back.

"See for yourself, Chieftain. It seems the gods have intervened and sent the Northerners a champion. My men have so far proven incapable of stopping him." She said. "I assume your forces have already joined the search efforts?"

"Aye that, they're unda-way." Jute had a horrendous underbite, and his teeth were exposed as he gawked at the pods, his little baboon-eyes lighting up in wonder. "-Rightly reportin casualties as well."

"_Really?_" Cynder paused mid-sip.

"Yep. Missin a Dready from one of me wings." Jute gestured over the landscape ahead of them. Screeches echoed out as a cluster of Dreadwings flew out from the northern edge of the sky, lowering altitude to land at the front gates of Forlorn. There were at least fifteen or twenty of them. "I brought my fastest fliers. Had to leave my bloody ground legion back at Tall Plains and the northern coast. Couldn't get em past the geysers."

"Of course you couldn't." Cynder had been hoping the Apes would've just done what they were best at: forgetting all strategy and running _through_ obstacles like sociopathic battering rams. The casualties were acceptable if it meant more men quicker. But then again, the Fallen and Spyra seemed undaunted by numbers. "Was your Dreadwing working with a large fellow? Really hairy, barked a lot, and he had quite the arm for an axe wreathed in unholy electricity?"

"Ya just listed off a quarter of the officer corps ya did." Jute pointed. "But yeah, I fink that was the guy. _Sy-_somethin, real aspirant dat one. Boys are saying the drag and this _hoo-man_ roasted him like a chestnut."

"_Of_ _course they did._" Cynder manically giggled, her eye twitching as she sipped her teacup daintily. "Have I ever told you how much I passionately despise you all?"

"Uhhhhh, several times, but not recently." Jute grinned, evidently taking it as a joke. Which it wasn't. But fuck, Cynder's bad mood _always_ could take a backseat. Couldn't it? "I'd love ta see this Purple Drag and her alien sky-man stop my airborne warriors. Visigoth may have gotten a good deal with the infantry, but if ya don't mind me sayin: the way to crush the toughest is ta come at em from the direction they'd least expect."

Jute jabbed a thumb at the sky.

"_Up top!_"

"I concur, Chieftain." Cynder put her empty cup down and preened her wings, her headache still pounding. "I concur."

* * *

{🐉}

Visigoth growled and slipped his dripping length out of the smaller female. She didn't give much of a reaction aside from a rapturous shiver and wheeze, her little furry tail pitifully trying to wrap around his huge waistline in futile swipes.

The Chieftain stepped back and snatched a rag off a table, getting to work with cleaning up the mess as his chosen whore of the day staggered to her feet and knuckles. She had this dumb look on her face as she tied up the wrappings concealing her little teats and filthy fur.

"Your company is no longer needed." He specified without making eye contact. The other Ape cooed, bowing submissively as she attempted to edge closer and hold out a paw to him. "_I said get out._" He barked.

The Ape shrieked and scurried out of the tent. Visigoth grumbled some sexist obscenity under his breath and turned around to find his armor and weapons, stacked haphazardly like a pile of detritus in the back of his lair.

His mood was grim the last few days, since Tinker's potions had fixed his teeth and his tail. The defeat he'd suffered at the hands of the purple dragon had humiliated him and it was sitting in his gut. His men were failing, as they prowled swamplands and got their tails handed to them by the errant _hoo-man_ Fallen and the prophesized savior of the realms.

Things couldn't be going worse. All they needed was the Forlorn to spontaneously explode or-

"-_Chieftain! _Capital, have I brought to you the most outstanding of news, I-" Tinker burst through the entryway with a rush of cloth, his overjoyed expression falling off his face when Visigoth's still messed malehood flopped in his direction like a sopped, veiny noodle. "-_Good heavens! I'm blind!_" The mechanic shrieked, paws slapping over his face.

"Shut the flaps." Visigoth snarled, snatching a waist belt and a loincloth off a chest. "Was it not enough that I was bested by a purple hell-beast in front of a whole unit? Now, you would see me indecent before the entire camp?"

"Respectfully, sir, that unit at the cave suffered over ninety-eight percent losses." Tinker pointed out with a free paw, the other still held over his eyes as he stepped inside.

"_Tinker!_"

"Rightright, yes, of course, jolly good, dropping the subject would be a healthier alternative altogether. Besides, today is a mighty well day indeed! For we have received reinforcement from-"

"_Wher's me landlocked, brutish and egg-smashin brother at?!_"

Tinker squealed as the flaps he was standing before were smashed aside, sending him tumbling into a stool nearby with a hideous crashing of wood. His monocle noticeably flipped through the air and bounced off Visigoth's mighty chest.

"…._Oi,_" Chieftain Jute's dumb grin faded as his eyes melded down Visigoth's nude body, and settled on his laxed spear. "…At least let me buy ya a bleatin drink first."

"_Jute._" Visigoth sneered, whipping the loincloth and securing it over himself before trotting over to where Tinker was lying on his face. "You've never enjoyed the boundaries of privacy up in those ziggurats of yours, haven't you?"

"It's hard ta get a moment when everythin's open-floored, with the Dreadywings and whatnot." Jute chuckled, rubbing his shoulder furs as he stepped fully into the tent and extended a paw. "I came ta win yer war!"

"You're still not funny. And you almost killed my mechanic." Visigoth humorlessly quipped, reaching down and plucking Tinker from the dirt like he was a weightless ragdoll. The Ape hooted as he dangled in Visigoth's grip, eyes quickly checking the loincloth on him as he sighed in relief.

"Who?" Jute blinked.

"_This one,_ you aerial oaf." Visigoth shook Tinker in his face, ignoring the panicked cries and curses.

"_P-Perhaps this is a poorer time-! L-Let me excuse myself, my chief-_" Tinker howled as Visigoth threw him away with a horrid crash of refuse.

"Some menial abuse is essential, given it all…" Visigoth growled under his breath, taking Jute's paw in a firm clasp. "Brother, news from the north might just save my heart from bursting."

"Good fing too! The Mistress looks like she's ready ta hurl herself off the Forlorn's plat." Jute jammed a thumb over his shoulder. "I brought ya a whole flight of Dreadys. Me and you are gonna find this Purple Drag and the Fallen and teach em whatfer. How are ya, Visigoth?"

"Alive and in charge." Visigoth drawled, pulling on some leather padding and a single pauldron before nodding for the tent flap. He ignored the pained mewls of Tinker in the back. "Tell me what you must, Jute, but _outside,_ let us walk."

"Ya always pace whenevva someone's got gob to say." Jute laughed. "Tall Plains must've made me fuzzy, cause I was lumbering here and I couldn't rememba a single face, aside from yours."

They drabbled as they came outside and meshed with the busy insides of Forlorn's atrium. Apes left a wide berth, hurrying around with weapons, tools and chunks of Mana gems. The boilers were hissing in the backdrop, and now the roars of Dreadwings were echoing around as riders ushered their mounts into makeshift stables made out of rubble rings, scrap hangars and collapsed pylons.

"Cynder's really turned the tower into a proppa bastion she has." Jute observed. "Even if it smells like the inside of a volcano. She means ta turn Forlorn into a second Monkano? I don't fink the Conducta and that crazy lady he's always tryin ta please are gonna like the competition. Didya hear about Daragon by the way?"

"Of course I did." Visigoth's mind was elsewhere, but he humored the discussion nonetheless. "The war is escalating. I have no doubt that the Warfang-dredges are going to try and get this Purple Dragon back to their city if they find out about her. I fear we must watch for some kind of an incursion."

"Not if Daragon keeps undoin itself the way it has." Jute cackled. "The Realm-a-Vines is about ta get _ska-washed!_ Like a bug. It's all that Orcy-fellow's doin, and the Night Drags!"

"I think we need to focus our energy where it matters most." Visigoth said. "_Here,_ where we can kill that purple abomination before it takes root."

"_Chieftains! _Spotters have an eye on the drag and the _hoo-man!_" An Ape hurried over, flailing his arms. "They're at the tempol!"

"Ha-ha! I shoulda known me sense of good-luck woulda rubbed off the moment I landed." Jute punched Visigoth in the arm. "Send a whole flight of Dreadys!"

"And a contingent of my men." Visigoth butted in with a growl. "Crush them with a wall of flesh. We will arrive to reinforce shortly."

* * *

{🐉}

"So, in Warfang, people just… _fly_ everywhere? No walking?"

"There's _some_ walking, mostly from folks whose wings are a little strained, and the Moles, but _plenty_ of flying. No shortage of it, actually. We are creatures _of theeeee skyyyyy~!_" Morinth sang, preening her neck as she gave her wings another kick. "Really! You should see it on weekdays, especially when the markets first open? The heavens might as well be a cheeky little swarm of locusts. But you won't have to worry about that, mam, me and Tali' will show you all you need to know."

"Spyra? Can I ask you a question?" Taliopia shyly nudged closer, her wings folded outwards to maintain a constant glide. The three dragonesses were flying in a circle around the temple, quite low, to see the surrounding area.

"Yeah, shoot." Spyra was flying between the two of them, distracted by gazing at them both one after the other over her shoulders. She could hardly believe she was flying with other dragons in the first place. To Morinth and Taliopia it was common, basic, _not special._ Spyra marveled at them.

"You've been living in these swamps your entire life?" Taliopia looked down at some willow trees. "How did you not get hurt?"

"I got hurt _loads._ Clawed, bitten, fell in ravines, tripped, broke a few bones…" Spyra listed off, flapping her wings to keep altitude. "Didn't fly a whole lot before now, though. My folks always told me to stay away from Mana Crystals, apparently, never knowing I _needed_ the things to gain super powers!"

"_Super-powers?_" Morinth laughed. "But this is what dragons are meant to be able to do _all the time!_ Mana Crystals are keys to life for us, mam, gifts from the Ancestors, people say."

"There are stories that when the first dragons died, they embued their souls into the earth of the world, to keep regenerating strength for future generations." Taliopia proudly recited. "I read that in a book."

"My Tali-wali is a bit of a _nerd._" Morinth risked butting Spyra in the head for how close she had to lean for the whisper to get through the draft.

"_Morri-poo! _You're embarrassing me…" Taliopia clicked her tongue and turned away.

"Why do you talk like that all the time? It's weird." Spyra crinkled her snout. "Don't tell me you lot are like a buncha _nuns_ or something."

"_Nooo-hooooo~!_" Morinth sang. "_Me and Taliopiaaaa are an iteemmmmm~!_"

"An item? I…. wait… _oh._" Spyra coughed, tucking her forepaws to her breast. "…That's, uhm…. _different. _T-To all their own, huh?"

"I couldn't have said it better myself." Morinth chirped. "Seeing as you're supposed to be the savior of the Dragon Realms, you know Spyra, drakes are going to _throw themselves _at you. _En masse._ You're quite the eye-fetcher, if you'll excuse my saying."

Taliopia gave off this manic, giggly-sounding noise, frowning and swallowing a visible lump down her throat as she flapped to fly over and around Spyra, to get to Morinth's other side.

"_Morri-poo…_" She dotingly whined.

"Oh, _hush,_ my dear, you're the only one in my eye." Morinth hummed. "Spyra? Why do you look like that for? Flying making you a bit ill? Let's land for a bit and take a break."

"Sure thing." Spyra glumly sighed.

The three dragonesses found a ridge and set down with a few wingflaps and kick of paws. Taliopia had an embarrassed flush on her snout as she sidled up to Morinth and nuzzled into her flank. Spyra trailed from them and stood on the ridge's cracked edge, looking down at an assortment of peat-bogs and reed swells below.

"My wings needed a good stretch." Morinth idly summed, wriggling her membranes in a pruning flap. "One thing I must warn you of, dear, is the flight over the Frontier Sea. Horrible thing. Always takes too long and makes your joints stiff."

"How long is that flight?" Spyra asked, not turning away from the view.

"A few hours with good navigation. You'll have the Wing with you, Warfang's finest. We'll get you there safe and sound." Morinth nudged Taliopia along and soon the three dragons stood side by side. "How's it like, living with dragonflies your whole life?"

"Boring. Everyone around you is a dwarf, you can't eat normal food, you're a spectacle in school, and socially you're an outcast. Oh, and it's lonely. Everyone either doesn't understand you, is afraid of you, or dislikes your company. Except for my family. They're awesome." Spyra dryly listed.

"That sounds rough." Morinth admitted, still with her usual sing-song voice.

"Ya' don't know the half of it." Spyra puffed, whipping her tail.

"Actually, I know a fair deal about being ostracized. My father was a _Night Dragon,_ everyone shunned my mum when she came back from the war, preggers with me." Morinth explained. "I had to go to the academy, and everyone hated my guts. _Hatchling of the enemy,_ they'd call me, _Traitor-Child_ too. When I joined the army, my mum had died of a broken heart and I literally just had the wings on my back to keep me going."

"Ouch." Spyra winced. "…Look, I didn't mean ta' sound like the edgy bitch in the corner or nothing, it's just…"

"Life is hard." Morinth soothed, laying a wing on Spyra's. "But we all find our songs."

"I-I feel like I'm still looking, all the time." Taliopia leaned into Morinth and sighed. "…But you're supposed to save everybody, Spyra, how can't you have all the answers?"

"It doesn't feel like I do." Spyra creased her chops, thinking about the Fallen. "…but that human found me, boy-oh-boy. We're in the shit now."

"O-Oh, _h-him._" Morinth cleared her throat, her tone suddenly losing all its semblance of confidence. "Yes, cheeky that, he's a peculiar sort of creature, isn't he?"

"He kind of scares me." Taliopia shivered, and then slapped her chops. "…b-but he seems… _nice._"

"Really? He does?" Morinth gulped. "I-I mean… _I think he's a little rude…_"

"He's a complete asshole." Spyra shrugged. "But he's the best asshole I've ever met, and I'm stickin' with him. He's gotten me this far."

"…._Oh no._" Morinth swept out her wings suddenly, yanking the two dragonesses back from the ridge edge and behind some thickets. "_Sssh! Stay down!_"

"_Dafuck?_" Spyra sputtered, spitting a black wing-joint from her snout and swatting at fat frond leaves. "Stay down from what?"

"_Eep~!_" Taliopia slapped paws over her own mouth and shivered in the shade. There was a screech overhead and the heavy flap of wings.

"Aw, crap, not _more_ of those things…" Spyra groaned.

A Dreadwing sailed over the ridge, flying westward, the Ape on its back had his eyes scanning the very same foliage they were in. The Dreadwing was flanked by two more of its kind, and together, the howling monsters flew off over the swamps, their cries echoing and becoming distant.

"They had to have seen us." Morinth's inner-soldier was coming out, and she sounded stern as she pointed with her tail back towards the way they had come. "We should get back to the temple."

* * *

{🐉}

"No, you idiot, it doesn't work like that. What do you want her to do, laugh at you and swat you in the face with her tail?" Corrinthol cringed. "Knowing you, with that glass-jaw, you'll be all over the floor and crying for your mommy."

"What's wrong with taking a gentle-drake's approach?" Torrdonal asked innocently. He cleared his throat and repeated again: "Professor Cyrila, I'm a former graduate of your class two years ago, and I must say, that your intellectual study of the elements of aquatic nature has stuck with me. I wish to implore you: might I buy you lunch this afternoon?"

"You're such a pansy." Corrinthol scoffed. "Women don't want honesty, they want you to lie to them. They want to hear what they want to hear. You're not being assertive."

"But I wouldn't want to be rude…"

"Professor Cyrila is the _def-i-nition,_ of rude, you simpleton. One day, I'm gonna' have to educate you on the ways to a dragoness' heart. I learned from the best, after all: my good ole' dad. He's an officer in the corps."

"I know." Torrdonal nodded. Corrinthol was always threatening people with that knowledge, how could one forget? Like that one time at the watering hole when he'd gotten in that fight and started screaming at all the other dragons involved about how his dad would crush their windpipes. "I just think that females need to be treated with a little more… _respect_ than you'd offer some other males. Like ones you would tell about your pa."

"_No,_ no that's… not how it works. Damn it, Torrdonal, water dragons are supposed to be _transparent,_ how'd you end up with such a thick skull?" Corrinthol sneered. "Don't tell me: your dad's an _earth dragon_ ain't he?"

"No, my-"

A screech on the wind cut them both off. The dragons stopped on the edge of the temple's fall pond and looked up just in time to see a Dreadwing flicker over the horizon above. Torrdonal's jaw dropped and Corrinthol squealed.

"-_D-D-D-DREADWING!_" –He stammered. "_MOMMY!_" And hurled himself into the water with a loud _splash._

Torrdonal shrieked when some of the water speckled his forepaws, and he danced into a thicket before tumbling through the leaves and crying out something about him not drowning.

Nearby, the Fallen, Harad and Ignitia hurried through the smashed front doors of the structure and gazed up at the receding Dreadwing shrinking over the forest line ahead.

"We've been spotted." Harad growled, whipping an angry glance at his fumbling soldiers in the pond outside. "I'm going to tear their heads off."

"It was only a matter of time before we were detected." Ignitia sighed. "This plan of yours, Fallen? It seems we've reached an need to speed its actioning. We need to get going if it is to work."

"I doubt this." Harad vented. "_Still,_ I advise against suicide, as shocking as you might find that, _Fallen._"

"The only thing shocking here is your astutely ugly looks and lack of faith in those more enlightened, Hrafal." The Fallen raised a brow.

"_It's Harad, you son of a bitch!_"

"Stop yelling, Haggrid, I'm thinking…" The human turned away and ripped the crossbow strapped to his back off. "We're about to get hit. You two know how to fight, yeah?"

Harad sputtered over his own tongue, and Ignitia rolled her eyes.

"_Someone_ had to thwart you both in the lobby, and it certainly wasn't those two." She pointed her tail at Torrdonal and Corrinthol. "You might be correct, however, holding off the initial assault in a defensible position would be advisable. Where are Spyra, Morinth and Taliopia?"

"There." The Fallen nodded to three growing shapes overhead. "…_Ignitia, Fallen, we saw a…._"

"Ignitia! Fallen! We saw a Dreadwing!" Spyra heaved, landing roughly with a scrabble of her claws on the stairs besides Morinth and Taliopia. "They were flying back to Cynder's tower!"

"No doubt for gathering reinforcements." Ignitia said. "Fallen, I've been riveted with tales of your ferocity in the field. Would you care to demonstrate?"

"Anything to please a lady." The Fallen winked.

Just then, the ground trembled, and a blast of dust took up the front of the ancient, overgrown steps.

The purple and black mass of a Dreadwing rose from the impact zone, and its horrid screech pierced all their hearing.

"I hate these fuckin' things." Spyra cringed.

The air whooshed, their feet quivered.

**_Crash~!_**

**_Crash-Crash-Crash~!_**

**_Crash~!_**

Dust and pebbles flew everywhere. Six Dreadwings surrounded the stairs, their yellow eyes glowing through the humus to stare directly at them.

"_Yah~!_" One of their riders screamed. The beasts howled and stamped their wing-joints.

"But they just _love_ us." The Fallen chuckled.

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo 2 OST: Peril}**_

* * *

Today had been a rough day for Palmet. First, he'd caught a bad wind of fleas on top of the infestation he was already suffering. Next, that rash on the back of his left leg had started to flare up, and he'd spent so much time scratching it until it bled this morning that he'd missed gruel-hour back at Forlorn. After that, he'd been paired up with an Ape that couldn't stop messing himself the whole patrol. Then, his whole unit got wiped out, and an alien being who had fallen from the sky had royally fed him his own ass, bound, gagged and beaten him up.

Now he was tied up on the floor. And it was cold because of the breeze this high up.

It really couldn't have gotten much worse.

Then he saw the Dreadwings flying overhead, a whole cluster of them, riders whooping as they whipped and kicked their ferocious mounts into frenzies.

"-_Oi~! Lads! Eeeellllpppp~!_"

Palmet had screamed himself hoarse by the time the last of them had finished crossing over the temple, and the sounds of due fighting had echoed across the air.

Wheezing, Palmet rolled onto his feet, still tied up, and tried to waddle to the stairs leading up to the temple's rear doors. Halfway up the flight, he tripped, and rolled like a loose turd back all the way he'd come, a fragrant miasma of horrid curses leaving his throat, annunciated with each kick and thwack until he reached the bottom and lie there, twitching.

He tried again and managed to stumble to the doors themselves, using a furry shoulder to nudge one ajar so he could squeeze his bound form through.

Inside the temple, the battle sounded hollow, but the distinct ambiance of slashing metal, exploding dynamite and dying Apes was still apparent. Palmet grimaced at the mighty dragon statue in the center of the elemental training room, making sure to skirt around it as he hobbled for the temple's deeper portions.

"…_A'course I ain't bloody navigated some doomed, spooky, ancient drag ruins befer for prior reference…_" His mumbles echoed down the empty, mushroom-overgrown halls as he wandered. "…_Why'd _my_ patrol have ta be the one? What about Gruloog's lads? They're the ones always stealing the jerky strips from the cauldrons round the camp. They got enough karma rearin behind em to outdo the arse on a basilisk! Bloody simian ancestors of yore! Ya'll ain't good fer nothing, and I ain't nevva preyin to ya on a whim again!_"

The Ape passed the egg chamber and paused in the doorframe, offering the toppled shelving units a contemptuous snort before resuming his trek.

Dragons were no good airborne newts anyhow.

The world would've been better off if all those presumptuous perfume-letters and gluttons dropped dead.

He found the lobby gallery next, and, stumbling over drifts of rubble and around pillars, Palmet gasped when sunlight blared in through the smashed front doors.

The dead spider was still there, a bloody mess. But beyond that, was a fair commotion of warfare that caught his interest.

The Fallen was swinging around a pair of cleavers like it was nobody's business. Palmet gave his best face of monkey-borne intrigue as he witnessed his brothers getting sliced by the bushel.

Apes flew from him in pairs as he hacked and slashed and cut like a madman, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. Morinth and Taliopia were out there too, the latter crying loudly as she was chased in circles by a larger Ape officer with an axe over his head, the prior singing some kind of opera-note as she ripped her tail-blade from the innards of a dying Ape soldier.

The cindering corpse of a mighty Dreadwing was draped over the stairs' flank, sliced, burned and roasted to oblivion. Another Dreadwing screamed as combined trails of fire incinerated its skull, Ignitia and Spyra advancing side-by-side and drowning the beast in their elemental hell.

There was an explosion and a scream of pain. A Dreadwing flopped onto its back with its ribcage blasted ajar, the Fallen latched onto its head and screaming all kinds of obscenities. There was an Ape trying to crawl away, whilst also stuffing his own organs back into his gut. Another was making a run for the woodlands holding his own severed arm. There was an officer trying to rally the troops. The Fallen chucked a stick of dynamite into his open mouth and showered the surrounding area with chunks of brain and globs of blood.

Hell on earth, that shit.

Palmet shrugged, like he was looking at the most common thing since sliced bread, and immediately scampered out the doors, past the steaming corpses, and to one of his own fallen comrades.

The Ape was still twitching when Palmet giddily kicked him over and unveiled the cleaver sticking from the bloody mud.

"Sorry there, lad, it ain't like ya need it anymore itself."

Palmet winced when a nearby explosion sent an entire troupe of Apes cartwheeling in various states of dismemberment. One of them landed nearby, howling his head off as he held the bloody pair of squirting stumps that had been his legs. Some of the blood speckled onto Palmet as he lined his binds underneath himself with the blade.

"-_Oi!_ Watch yer jam! I'm workin here, ya filthy monkey!"

**_Sshksshksshkssshksshk_**

-He started to saw the rope tying off his lower half and wrists against the cleaver. He grinned when the lines started to snap one by one, agonizingly.

"…_Just a little more dere…_"

An Ape Commander wielding a flaming warhammer leaped over the mounded cadaver of a dead Dreadwing and swung at the Fallen in an overhead strike. The human rolled under the fiery sweep and planted his heel right underneath the chainmail skirt and into the Commander's crotch, effectively crunching his orangutan-oranges.

The Commander screamed like a little girl and fell to his stubby knees. The Fallen snatched his own warhammer from his paws and brought it in a two-handed uppercut into his snout. The Commander's face exploded in a fiery burst of gore, and the headless corpse flipped onto its back. The Fallen steadied the warhammer, screaming at the top of his lungs as a band of flame shot out in the form of a fireball, and smacked into a Dreadwing coming in for a sweep overhead.

The beast screamed and created a blast-skid that covered the whole battlefield from end to end, taking a plethora of Ape footsoldiers with it to the grave.

Palmet only started cutting again when he felt his mouth twitch, and a gathering puddle of urine he'd made seep into his leg fur.

"…_C'mon… C'mon…. YES…._"

**_SNAP~!_**

"-_I'm free! Ya hear?! I'm free! Wooo~!_"

Palmet threw the ropes off, ran over to a dead Ape and snatched a dynamite stick off his bandolier. He yanked the fuse lit, hauled back, and teetered forward, aiming for the Fallen.

But then the poor Ape tripped over a severed leg from one of his fellows, and the dynamite flew way off course into the distance. It landed in a bundle of Ape infantry that had reformed to mount another charge, and detonated with a resounding **_whmpp~! _**–of thunder. Limbs were still falling by the time Palmet righted himself on his paws and knees, and surveyed the carnage.

"…Nuts." Was all he said.

"_Ahhhhh~!_" Screeched an Ape, who hauled back with a warhammer and caught the Fallen in the chest with the hilt.

The human sailed fifteen feet and landed in the dirt right next to Palmet. The wild look in his eyes briefly minimized as he turned over and met the Ape's gaze. For a moment, the two stared at each other, even as Spyra flew overhead and roasted a column of crossbowmen attempting to retreat.

"…Ello." Palmet waved cheaply.

"You got out of your binds." The Fallen pointed at him. "I tie wicked knots, how did y-"

"Found a cleava." Palmet shrugged.

"_Ah._ Well, good on you."

The Fallen head-butted him.

**_Crack~! _**–went their skulls. Palmet shrieked and rolled onto his back in agony.

"_For the dragon-pussy!_" The Fallen hollered, jumping to his feet like a springy rabbit, and running for the nearest Ape.

Blades slashed, dragons roared, Dreadwings screamed and Taliopia cried.

When it was all over, the field in front of the temple's beautiful pond looked like a slaughterhouse.

"….*_cough* -_Soldiers…. r-rally to me…" Harad heaved, limping through several corpses, his mace-tail- dripping with blood –came down in a slash upon a corpse next to his haunch that was still twitching. Bone crunched, and the Ape went very still.

Ignitia came slowly from the chaos, covered in dirt, cuts and bruises, her claws drenched in gore, and soot trailing through her nose and teeth.

Corrinthol was in a fetal position on the edge of the pond water, sucking fervently on a talon as he rocked on his own bloodied tail. Torrdonal was nearby, out of all things, staring with horror at the water instead of all the viscera.

Spyra was the only one smiling, exhausted, but still smiling.

"….T-That was a workout." She sidled up to Ignitia and slapped the older dragoness on the ass, making her squeak and hop forwards. "Nice work there, babe'."

"Careful, or I might have to touch the bootay myself there." The Fallen called, limping, as he navigated past a pair of dead Dreadwings. "How is everyone?"

"_Alive._" Harad wheezed.

"…_W-Water…_" Torrdonal muttered with wide eyes.

"_Mommy. Mommy. Mommy._" Corrinthol chanted with each rock on his tail. Eventually, he just broke out into a long, panicked sob and nothing else understandable blubbered out of his snout.

Poor lad.

He was still a fetid, crimson cunt.

"T-Tali'? _Tali'? W-Where's Taliopia?!_" Morinth scampered among some of the corpses, panic-striken, looking around wildly.

"Don't mind her." The Fallen rolled his shoulder, where Taliopia's unconscious form slouched over his back. He patted the poor white dragoness on the haunch, and whispered when Morinth bounded over. "_I think it was all a bit overwhelming for her. She'll be fine._"

"We kicked ass." Spyra sauntered over and hip-bumped him. "Wanna' go all the way and fuck that tower up too?"

"As if I would say no." The Fallen jittered his eyebrows. "Glory be to the first man to die."

Harad honestly looked terrified of him.

"Hey! I got a live one over here…" Spyra said, nodding to one of the fallen Apes. "Waitasec, isn't that the guy who saw us fucking?"

"_E-Excuse me?_" Ignitia gasped.

The Fallen carefully placed Taliopia down and snarled as he stomped over to Palmet. The Ape whined as he was dragged to his feet.

"Give me one reason I shouldn't put my fist through your face." The Fallen snapped.

"Why're you even asking?" Spyra quirked a brow.

Palmet shivered as his eyes darted between the dragons and the human. For a long moment, he was silent. Then, he fell to his knees, and bowed until his face ate the bloody mud.

"_M-Master._" He stammered, kissing at the human's boots.

"Oh god, you gotta' be kidding me." Spyra cringed. "What are we going to do with him?"

"I never said I'd refuse an Ape butler." The Fallen shrugged. "Besides, he's kind of fun to keep around. Always makes things interesting."

"_M-Master…_" Palmet muttered, still kissing the boots.

* * *

{🐉}

The moment Visigoth's Dreadwing touched down, it was nothing but Jute screaming.

"_SPARKLES?!_" The Chieftain shrilly cried, hopping off his own armored steed as he ran through the field of stinking corpses. "_Sparkles, is dat you?!_"

The great northern warlord came to an abrupt halt at the foot of one of the massive Dreadwing corpses dotting the battlefield. The beast was blackened from dragonflame with soot still dancing off the bristles on its ruined back.

Chieftain Jute quivered as he fell to a kneel, and sobbed in a ball of quivering fur and snot before the felled abomination.

"-_T-They killed him-_" Jute choked. "-*_Snnnkkkkffff*- dey killed SPARKLES!_"

Visigoth fluttered his chops as he blew out a defeated puff of air, his eyes scanning the mounds of dead Apes lying around everywhere.

From the air, this clearing had looked almost black, what with the bodycount. Infantrymen were still prowling about and getting an accurate number, but if memory served, this conglomerate unit possessed around three hundred men.

_Had_ possessed three hundred men. Visigoth nudged a dead soldier in the furry ribs and snorted. Many of the dead were killed with Ape weapons.

_Fallen._

Visigoth snarled as blood-rage welled in his chest.

"This _hoo-man _is apparently unstoppable." The Chieftain muttered, turning as Cynder trotted nearby, her austere gaze sweeping the area too. "We need to find him. All three of us. So that we may combine our talents and slay him in a three-to-one duel. Infantry, Dreadwings, Commanders even have all proven ineffective. This needs to end now, Mistress."

"The Temple always looks so dilapidated these days, does it not?" Cynder ignored him, nodding at the sad structure just ahead. "I bet you remember first bracketing those halls, Chieftain, when someone besides me possessed your leash. Did you feel freer back then? Or perhaps less enlightened."

"I felt _younger._" Visigoth growled. "My Apes have already searched the temple, Mistress, they aren't inside."

"Walk with me."

Cynder was silent as the two of them trekked through the beaten lobby. Though Visigoth noted the almost dreamy expression on the black dragon's face the entire time. Cynder appeared distant, or perhaps locked in some kind of mental prison as she examined all the chandeliers, the carvings and murals, the draconic architecture matting the structure in soaking detail.

She passed into an archway, not needing to voice aloud her desire for him to follow. They entered into a large room ringed with collapsed shelves, whose floor was littered with a trio of runic dais plates.

"….Malefora has purposefully limited my knowledge the entire time I have served her." Cynder muttered, her gaze fixated on the large egg mural taking up the northern wall. Visigoth snorted and balanced his axes in his grip, looking around boredly at the shelves.

It had been a while, but he remembered. The eggs. His foot. The cracking sounds. He used to feel more alive with every dragon he killed. Now it had all become grim noise of ceaseless fashion and woe.

This temple had no nostalgic value to him whatsoever, and frankly, he wanted to leave.

"They're probably going after something important to us right now." He said, harboring a rare moment where he was compelled to speak without honor of rank. "You may choose to wallow in your own self-loathing, but I'll remind you that when Malefora seeks heads for failure, _both_ of us will kiss the axe. Collect yourself, Cynder."

"I've killed people for less coming out of their mouths." Cynder didn't move, her wings idly levitating in a preened pose just behind her regal neck. "This Purple Dragoness terrifies you, Visigoth, enough that you're more afraid of her than you are of me."

"It terrifies _you_ more." He snarled. "I've overcome foes that were supposed to be invincible before."

"You killed a _pig_ and are worshipped for it."

"And you can't win favor unless it is fed to you, you stupid little girl." He barked.

Cynder was on him in a second, had him pinned to the floor, his axes flew away on clinging metal, and she presided over him with silent menace.

"Say more if you want this all to end." Cynder whispered. "You're just a breath away from it. Say it. Give me something to vent my rage upon."

"Is that was this is all about?" He choked, her claw compressing his furry throat. "You think this is all some kind of _board game._ That there are pieces, and that things leave the board, and they're gone from the playing square. You think in stone, she-drake. These immovable nuances you've buried yourself in are going to get every single one of us killed."

"Did my egg come from this place?"

Visigoth's expression dropped.

"…What?" He grunted.

"Did my egg come from this place."

Cynder didn't appear to have spoken, but her soulless, white eyes were locked on him with an immovable stance.

Visigoth honestly felt confused. He had been… shouting about other matters, evidently, having misread the source of her anger.

Slowly, unsure, he raised a paw and pointed to a line of ruined shelves on one of the room.

"Your egg was right there. It was pitch black. It had rolled off a shelf when the unit fell from all the vibrations outside. I was seconds away from being too late from stopping one of my men from smashing you." He held his paw up in a cupping motion, simulating her weight in his palm. "The Dark Master whispered in my mind, told me to take _you_ specifically. You were to be the Terror of the Skies. Cynder, Cloudripper, Forlorn Lady. I made you that."

"You stole my life." Cynder told him.

"Nobody in this exchange tells false truths." Visigoth snorted. "I'm confused, Cynder, what the hell do you want me to tell you? That I feel _remorse?_ No. I don't feel remorse for anything. I've never felt remorse in my entire life. Time is a one-way road, and we can only go forwards. This world puts up walls that are too high to climb and they must be smashed, smashed low and harshly. The strongest thrive," He gestured to himself and her. "the weak are slaughtered." He gestured to the doorframe over his head.

"Regardless of our pasts," Cynder released her claw and started to stomp out of the room. He coughed and held his throat tenderly as she abandoned him. "we're linked at the hip now, Chieftain. We're both reliant upon the death of the purple nightmare and the subjugation of that human."

"_Subjugation?_" Visigoth struggled to his feet and picked up one of his axes. "What is this fascination with the Fallen? You hoard his sky-devices, scribble notes on his appearance… You told the Pathfinder to take that thing alive, didn't you?"

"Mistress, Chieftain?" An Ape officer stood in the arch frame. "…All the dead have been looted."

"Of their weapons?" Cynder whipped her gaze from Visigoth to the other Ape.

"No, Mistress, their boom-sticks."

Cynder's eyes went wide.

"Back to Forlorn, with speed." She barked.

* * *

{🐉}


	19. Chapter 18 - Historic Ghosts

**Dragon(s)layer**

**18**

* * *

**Historic Ghosts**

* * *

To say the Funguswood was dark was an understatement. Twisting thickets of mushroom encapsulated shadowy and claustrophobic tunnels. Stalks that interconnected and dumped out among one another further added to maze-like qualities already there. It was a nightmare only outdone by the fact that the Apes had snared a road right through it.

"They must use this trail to get all the wagons through." Morinth brought her snout low to the ground. "See? Wheel lines are all over the place."

"Stick to the foliage." The Fallen quietly reminded, several bandoliers of dynamite tethered over his chest. "We'll be spotted if we stay on the trail."

Warhorns were going off in the distance en masse. The party had to hunker down in the dark several times as trains of Apes lumbered back down in the direction of Forlorn. A few of them had carriages stocked with crystals and demolition equipment.

"Cynder's cleaning house." The Fallen said. "She's trying to regroup every Ape she has to defend the tower."

"How is this gonna' work if they know we're coming?" Spyra asked. "I'm all up for a bottom-out knock-em-dead brawl, but I'm not suicidal. There have to be hundreds of them at the tower, maybe a thousand."

"Gunpowder's a great mediator of numbers." The Fallen patted his bandoliers.

"_-I-Is this why I'm being tortured-?!_" Corrinthol snarled through grit fangs. The red drake's legs quivered as he hefted a colossal sack of explosives upon his back and between his wings.

"No, you're being tortured because you sir, are a coward and a scoundrel." The human patted one of Corr's wingtips reassuringly, smiling when the soldier wheezed and his knees threatened to lock. "And I happen to passionately dislike you, but don't believe that my decisions will ever be impacted by my personal inhibitions. Take one for the team in style, my crimson friend."

Spyra started laughing with Morinth, and even Taliopia was muffling a giggle behind her paw. Corrinthol was humiliated, and could only respond with a pained mewl underneath all the dynamite. Nearby, Torrdonal calmly walked by with a large sash of the explosives secured over his chest. He smiled cheaply at his fellow and tried to remain comment-less.

While they trekked, Ignitia had so far refused to cease glaring at him, silently brooding over something swirling around in her experienced mind. The Fallen tried to alleviate the stress with a cheesy smile, but the Fire Guardian wasn't having any of it.

"Maybe I could shine yer boots?"

And then there was _Palmet,_ who had refused to stop offering all manner of services to appease the Purple Dragoness and her human companion.

"Sort out yer ration pouches? _Oo! _Maybe, I could carry some of the red lad's boom-sticks and lessen the load!"

"_O-Oh, thank you!_" Corrinthol happily laughed, staggering off his path to move towards the Ape. The Fallen whisked in with the speed of a bullet. Before poor Corrinthol knew what was happening, a heel was crunching into his forepaw and twisting. The poor drake yowled in pain and fell on his face in the mud, the sack burying him under its weight.

"No, your duty as pack-mule is sacred." The Fallen jammed a finger at Palmet. "Suffer twice his punishment if you interfere, Bananas."

"_B-Bananas?_ Now that's just racist that is." Palmet sneered with distaste. "It's a common missyconseptshun that Apes love bananas so much! Why, I'd fancy myself a lover of roasted meats and veggietabobbles befer anythin else!"

"Who cares? Move or I'll roast your legs with a side of _veggie-ta-bobbles,_ you fuckin' freak." Spyra jammed a horn into his back, and the poor Ape scurried ahead with a squeal. "We're deep in the Funguswood now. No turning back."

The place did look awfully mysterious. Shadows ruled here, alongside purple shimmers from mushroom caps taking up the canopy above. Vines twisting together made odd and frightening arachnid shapes in the ambient glaze, and the only sounds of wildlife were toads, and the single hoot of a distant owl.

This landscape reeked of dark energy. The Fallen had seen many places like it. There was a cancer beneath the dirt that poisoned the trees and made animals sick. Malefora had done something underneath Forlorn, and he was certain it had to do with this _Pool_ that Palmet had mentioned.

"What's the artifact that the monkey mentioned?" He drew alongside the larger form of Ignitia.

"It is a Vision Pool." Ignitia said, glancing at him. "They are magical wells used by dragon wizards and witches to commune with one another across vast distances. There are very few of them left. One is in Warfang, at the behest of the Dragon Council, another lies in the academy, where myself and the other Guardians can consult for important messages."

"One of them is in the Dark Continent?"

"Malefora's Vision Pool. It is a bastardized copy of the structures dragons have built, a fake, if you will. The one beneath Forlorn was built by Stormwatch immigrants when they first settled the swamps. Now, it has been corrupted by Malefora's pool to serve her Dark Army. We should destroy it the moment we find it, Malefora could bewitch us through its stone." Ignitia explained. "Cynder is a fearsome witch, but you have not seen power until you have witnessed the Dark Master and her foul tricks. It is those very powers that made Cynder who she is today."

"Why did Malefora go evil anyhow? Especially if she was the first Purple Dragoness?" Spyra asked.

"She was greedy, and power-hungry, envious of others' creativity to such an extent that she became consumed by malevolence and hatred. She wants to destroy the world so that she can reforge it in her own image." Ignitia doted on her as they walked. "It is a fate that I was destined to protect you from, when you were still an egg. If I hadn't put you in that basket, I fear what may have happened instead."

"I do love a woman who thinks on the fly." The Fallen sighed. Spyra growled and hit him in the head with a tossed twig.

"T-This place is scary." Taliopia swallowed, hiding under Morinth's wing.

"It's just shadows and frogs, nothing more." Harad snorted, proudly walking in the center of his ragtag Wing with his helmed head high. "I do not fear a forest of giant fungus stalks. I _do_ fear being underprepared in this raid of yours, Fallen."

"Don't get your tail in a bunch, this is by far not the craziest move I've pulled." The Fallen reassured. "A wiser man once said to me: _Bring down that which seeks to impose._ Now I'm no hippie, but I am quite certain we have what it takes to bring Forlorn crashing to a late grave."

"If we succeed, this victory will be bittersweet." Ignitia smiled. "Forlorn is one of the oldest draconic structures in the south. We're destroying a piece of artwork that can never be remade."

"Significance isn't worth lives." The Fallen chimed. "I've seen many people who learned so the hard way. But enough about that, we have a job to do, and we'll get it done."

"Fallen, where do you come from if not from this world?" Morinth cautiously matched her pace with his and gazed at him. "Did you come from the Eternal Moons?"

"I came from a portal." He shrugged, earning even Harad's attention. "It's my job, to see the Multiverse. You can take it from my lips, that at least you all know now that you aren't alone in the grander scheme of things."

"What are these other worlds like?" Taliopia's eyes looked starry. "Are they scary? Or nicer? _Pretty? _Ugly maybe?"

"Everything." He grinned. "Everything in-between. It's… _complicated._"

"Deja-vu." Spyra huffed. "Well those places don't matter right now. You're _here_, with us, with me, and that's what's important. Right, guy?"

"Right." He raised a brow when the purple she-dragon trotted closer and wrapped her tail possessively over his wrist. He let her yank him along.

"You lot don't argue as much as the boys." Palmet observed. "Apes would usually be at each other's throats several times by now, and a few teeth would get knocked out. It's all good fun though. Violence ain't damagin if ya keep it on the recreational level."

They found the tower after a short while of walking and navigating the twisting thickets.

The party emerged into a clearing lit with purple luminance from a large mushroom overhead. Yellow-eyed critters of some sort chattered as they spread out into the foliage penning the lot in to watch them silently from the darkness, giggling to themselves and scurrying about under the cover of thickets.

Forlorn was a gothic spear erupting from behind a few ringing plateau mounds stuffed with mushrooms. It spanned tens of stories into the cloudy day sky, holed through, crumbling, but mostly intact.

Black reams of soot dragged from the mouths of smokestacks poking out from the atrium bubble making the tower's coliseum-like base, and the distant, monstrous hoots of Apes were common and echoing.

"…I-I don't wanna' go in there." Taliopia became a quivering wreck and balled up under Morinth's wings, proving unreachable even as the black dragoness soothed her with a series of little coos and whispers.

"I thought it was bigger." Spyra sounded disappointed. "Y'know, this'd be perfect to say Cyndy-Two-Shoes is compensating for something, but… she's a chick, so…"

"I've met things I _thought_ were chicks only to realize the horrid truth." The Fallen shuddered, shouldering his bandoliers. "At least we know Cynder isn't like _that. _Are you all coming?"

"What has the Terror of the Skies done to it?" Harad hissed, he, Torrdonal and Corrinthol (the latter with difficulty past the sack) all craning back to look up at the structure. "It's the headquarters for an entire army! We need to turn back."

"When you're done soiling your diaper, tell me if your shit is the same shade of green as your scales, will ya', Haggardness?" Spyra called back, following the Fallen closely up a vined hill.

Harad's snout turned as red as a cherry.

"….I think both of you have a point." Torrdonal attempted cheerily.

Twigs snapped as Corrinthol finally gave under the weight and the sack compressed him to the earth with a mighty thud. Some dynamite sticks rolled away as he wriggled helplessly.

"-_Ahhh~! My leg! It's bending! BENDING! OW-Owowowowow-_"

"Tali', my _deeaaarrrr,_ you need to stop crying so we can disembowel the bad guys…" Morinth sang, lapping at the tear-stricken medic's horns.

Ignitia slapped a paw over her face and sighed.

"This is going to be a disaster." She muttered.

* * *

{🐉}

They came across what Palmet called a 'Spika-Cannon' just up the ridge.

A lone Ape sat in its cramped, rectangular confines, head lazily resting over a pair of handlebars inside the operator square. The Spika-Cannon had a crudely carved metal barrel sticking out the front, and according to Palmet, it could rotate on its base and fire razor-sharp spines of steel.

"He speaks the truth." Ignitia whispered as they hid behind a clump of entangled stumps. "We've faced Ape contraptions such as these in the past. Those spikes can punch clean through plate armor."

"Me and my boi' can handle it." Spyra grinned manically, nudging over to elbow the Fallen, and gasping when she realized he had vanished. "Fallen?"

There was a gurgling noise up ahead. The dragons all peaked over the stumps to see the Ape's limp body rolling out the side of the cramped cannon and into the grass. The Fallen wiped his machete blade off on the turret rim with a few sparking swipes and waved them over.

"Showoff." Spyra leaped onto his chest and playfully sank her teeth into his shoulder.

The layered plateaus leading up to the flank of Forlorn were heavily defended, and from the distance, they could see the main ramp to the tower's gates.

A pair of stone shortwalls guarded what had once been a flight of grand stairs. The Apes had flattened the flight for their wagon trains, and had installed Spika-Cannons along the tops of the crumbling walls. At least eight of the machines silently stood vigil there. There were gun emplacements spread sporadically up the plats, hidden in brambles, behind overturned tree logs and in crevices.

Lumbering patrols of Apes numbering twos and threes were easily dispatched. Ignitia, Harad, Morinth and Spyra bloodying their talons many a time. The Fallen took care of most of the guns, prior experience in radically different warzones than this allotting him the needed expertise to take them out.

An Ape at one point managed to escape being silently murdered and had sprinted away, tugging a warhorn off his belt. The Fallen nearly broke his neck climbing a dried embankment to get height's grace, and shoot the runner in the back with a crossbow bolt.

The whole time, the fantastical landscape of the Funguswood sprawled like a pulsating ulcer of black blood around them, only mediated by the bright rays of sunshine piercing the cloud cover in glittering bundles.

"See that?" Ignitia flapped her wings as she and Spyra jumped a plateau level and landed on the mossy flat above. She nodded for the horizon, where Spyra gasped at what she saw.

She had only ever heard stories of the arctic seas to the south. The purple beastess had never beheld an ocean in person.

The gray slick of endless mass was a blanket vanishing at the focal up to the north past a dull shore riddled with sharp coastal rocks and basalt stacks. Ignitia was nosing for a crumbled disc of architecture that was half sunk in the surf. It looked like a saucer of gray that had been swallowed partially by the sand, and drowned in dismal water. Spyra could pick out the toothpick-thin masses of a few towers sticking out of the water a mile or so in.

"That was once Stormwatch, mightiest dragon castle in the south." Ignitia said, keeping a distance when the Fallen sidled up beside them and knelt to observe the sights as well. Ignitia tested the air and eyed him suspiciously before draping a wing over Spyra and nudging her closer to herself. The purple dragon barely noticed, being so fixated on the view.

"What happened to it?" She whispered.

"Nobody knows." Morinth said behind them, the sunlight making her appear as if she was sapping light from the surrounding landscape with her darker hide. "It's destruction predates the Dark Army and the war. Some say Stormwatch was done in by its own title, the largest and most violent hurricane ever witnessed centuries ago."

"Many scholars believe it was a landslide. Stormwatch was constructed on uneven and soft terrain. As it developed its ports, its discus foundation became unbalanced and slipped into the surf." Ignitia looked back at Forlorn. "Our own history is dying all around us."

The Fallen sighed, meeting eyes briefly with Harad, who seemed almost embarrassed to take in the distant coast. He cleared his throat.

"We have to move quickly." He guided Spyra towards the tower. "I'm sorry." He uttered to Ignitia.

"_Born from Mana, return us through the end to earth and stone_." Ignitia quoted an ancient draconic warrior's saying.

"I always thought that fing was an ancient, giant toilet-bowl or somethin." Palmet teetered as he sat on a boulder nearby. Someone threw a rock that smacked off one of his eyes and made him howl as he rolled to the ground.

"_-I-I can't raise my neck._" Corrinthol complained, straining with the heavy bomb load.

"You aren't missing much, Corr'. It's really sad." Torrdonal shook his head and preened his wings.

"There it is." The Fallen surmounted the empty box of a Spika-Turret, ignoring the bloodied operator lying dead at his feet inside as he pointed for the tower's base.

Nestled among a small wood of entangled giant mushrooms, the foot of the massive atrium was broken in a space for a grated hatchway at the base of a smashed-open stone pipe. There was a spanning thicket locking the whole thing in from above, and a soupy, gray miasma rose from its interior.

"Shit's Creak is right." Spyra stuck out her tongue. "I can smell it from here."

"Yeah, well sacrifices must be- _ow- hey!_" The Fallen pinched an eye shut as Spyra jumped onto his back and hugged him around the shoulders, hanging there like a big, scaly, purple backpack beside his crossbow. "What are you doing?"

"Be a gentleman and carry a 'ness, would ya'?" Spyra brushed back her fiery head fins and winked at him.

"What makes you think I'll be reduced to a pack-mule like Corrinthol? I have a higher standard th-"

"-I'll let you bust a nut all over my face after we win."

"Off we go, keep all tails, wings and talons inside the vehicle at all times_._" The Fallen secured her forepaws and marched onwards, Spyra giggling maniacally as he hiked his tailbone and jostled her in her makeshift seat.

The smell had already been bad at their distance, but as they got closer to the edge of the thicket grove the aroma became loathsome.

To the dragons, it smelt of death. The Fallen could more accurately describe it as an ajar cesspool left unpumped for over a month.

The zone was a wound in the boggy, moss-ridden earth of the plateau ring. It imbedded downwards in a great slice completely overgrown with toadstools, mushroom caps and dead-looking ferns. Several smashed barrels, pieces of crates and a few bones lingered on the muddy shores surrounding the little basin.

The water itself was full of mirth and murk. You couldn't see through it at all. The Fallen grimaced, forcing himself to breathe out his mouth, as he leaned forwards and examined the hideous liquid. Mosquito larvae were wriggling in clusters down there. Hopefully, there weren't leeches to go along with it.

"_Blegh~! _That's fucked, dude." Spyra hacked, cupping her paws over her nose. "Good thing I brought my boy-stilts with me."

"I went through all that work to get you clean, woman, and this is the thanks I get…" The Fallen grumbled. "-Ah well, I've swam through worse."

"_N-No way._" Corrinthol struggled to shake his head, rolling over the massive sack until it pinned his left wing, but freed his torso at least. "I am _not_ going into that."

"There isn't an alternative?" Harad shivered, the question being forced through his pride. Behind him, Taliopia had turned green and had rushed off to a bush to vomit. Morinth, contrastingly, didn't look too bothered, and when Torrdonal quizzed her on this, she grinned morosely.

"When you spend your childhood living in sewer tunnels, you get used to other people's shit." She shrugged with her wings.

"But it's water." Torrdonal gasped. "_Water!_"

The Fallen- broken briefly from his wanderlust over the purple thang on his back –cringed.

He'd been to worlds where the slightest scent of weakness was met with overwhelming brutality and force. Places that could kindly be labeled hell, with all the fell horrors, secrets and monstrous spawn it could entail. After all that, now he was standing in front of a pool of sewage listening to a bunch of dragons try to hype themselves up for the dive.

_Sheltered. _–These people didn't understand war, even when it was happening all around them.

He decided that he liked this world. But then again, he'd decided that a few days ago. It was pretty nice here.

Minus the toxic sludge.

Ignitia gasped and turned her nose up at the little bog with an offended snort. She was only cowed for time when a pair of Dreadwings screeched overhead in a near pass. They needed to do this soon if it was going to work.

"I could carry you too." The Fallen leaned over smartly and flexed his brows at her. He laughed when the fire dragoness went wide-eyed, and turned away from him with a little '_Hmmph!' _–under her breath.

With care, she placed a talon in the disgusting soup, shivering down to the core of her scales when she sunk to the ankle with a hideous **_shllurrpp~! _**–noise bubbling out past her arm.

"_Ancestors._" Ignitia grit her teeth. "Allow me a moment to… to _acclimate._"

"I can't go in water!" Torrdonal cried, surprising the Fallen with his sudden decisive tone. "I'll drown!"

"_-I-It's your element, you idiot!_" Corrinthol howled under the dynamite. "_You literally can breathe underwater! You'll never drown! EVER! Even if you tried!_"

"Just like you'll never be the man you aspire to be, you red, ugly little girl." The Fallen smiled warmly. Corrinthol made a muffled, piercing noise as some of the linen bunched over his snout. It might've been some kind of feminine shriek of frustration. The world would never truly know. "It's either the disposal grate, or, I humbly ask for any volunteers to knock on their front doors and ask for sugar."

"I could try, M-M-" They all glanced at Palmet, who was stammering as he tried to force out the human's new title. He'd been having trouble addressing him as such since the battle, probably due to his Ape-pride resurging after the adrenaline had taken a hike. "-_Master._" Palmet swallowed. "I could try ta get in thru the front. Maybe dey wouldn't recognize me. You've been killin so many of Visigoth's boys that they must have put replacements from the north there."

"And what about the rest of the Wing?" Morinth chimed. "Apes don't take prisoners, they _eat_ dragons trapped on the ground. We couldn't fool them."

"I am actually going to be forced to do this." Ignitia placed a second claw into the disgusting pool. She tried to ignore the wriggling mosquito larva fleeing all around her wrists, and forced a smile. "The t-temperature is just _lovely._" She beamed, her eye experiencing a twitch.

"Trust me when I say these things go quicker with action. Just hold your breath and walk to a point." The Fallen slipped up to the knee into the horrid liquid, his face convulsing underneath practiced straightness. It was tough even for _him. _"Move quickly."

Harad grunted, steeled himself, and casually strode into the sewage, unblinking as the foul liquid slothed up to his breast and bubbled. He waded like a large, green iguana through the pool, keeping his wings high and out of the water's clutches.

Ignitia soon duplicated him, taking a breath through her mouth and holding it. Morinth went next, up to her knees, and held a paw for Taliopia.

"C'mon along, my sweet, we'll get nowhere dawdling any longer."

"B-But that water is _disgusting!_" Taliopia gasped. "A-And that tower is scary! I-I don't wanna' go inside! There's bad people in there! And more of those _Deadwings._"

"Dreadwings, honey."

"_Dreadwings! _Yeah…" Taliopia swallowed, pinching her snout. "…Morri-poo… I think I'm going to sit this one ou-"

Morinth snatched her by the tail and dragged her into the murk, humming pleasantly as the poor medic shrieked, flipped and rolled, casting wet globs of filthy sludge in every direction. The screams and splashing made it sound like someone was getting mauled to death by an alligator.

A drop splashed in Corrinthol's face, making him snarl as he trundled closer with the huge bag of explosives weighing him down.

"If you all want to die inside that place, then be my guest! I've got better things to do with my valuable life than throw it away on the haphazard plans of a _sky-man._ You hear me, _Fallen?_ Your plan isn't going to work! I know it isn't. You're gonna' fail, and all of you are gonna' die, including the Captain, and then I can take his job and lead my own Wing! Just like dad said I would one day. _Captain Corrinthol._ I like the ring of that. My talents will finally be recognized, and I'll be a war hero! Surviving the battle even the Purple Dragoness couldn't! But hey, that Purple Dragoness could always walk away and become the lawful mate of such a hero at any time!"

"_In your dreams, asshat._" Spyra snapped half-way from the pool. "I don't hitch up with _pussies._ I already have one, I don't need another."

"Goodness." Torrdonal blandly said beside him, watching Corrinthol's jaw go slack. "That's okay, Corrinthol, there's plenty of fish in the sea."

Torrdonal's supportive grin died, and his eyes crossed.

"A-And there's… _water…_" He shuddered.

Corrinthol growled and rolled the massive sack of dynamite onto the earth, grabbing the edge of the neck with two claws.

"Stop embarrassing yourself and take this end with me! Help me tug." He snarled as the Fallen waded through the now waist-deep sludge. "…_I _hate_ that alien thing._"

"Ya should see him when he gets pissed ya should."

Corrinthol cried out in surprise to see Palmet beside him.

"_Awright! _Don't go hollerin at me or nuffin, I'm just tryin ta make decent conversationz and whatnot." The Ape danced back with his paws up. "Dis is all so new to me, Northern Militareh Service and such. Do you fellows have a information pamphlet I could get my grips on at some point? Or free access buffets for prolonged deployment? We didn't get a whole lotta benefits workin with Cynder, she's a bit of a slave driver and all that..."

Corrinthol grabbed his bronze horns and yanked until it hurt. He swept a wing out and smashed Palmet across his ugly face, sending the poor Ape rolling down the turf where he splashed into the sewage with a heavy plop.

* * *

{🐉}

Across the pool there was a burst stone pipe sticking from the base of the massive atrium foot of the tower. Half of its length was open at the top and creepers overgrew it everywhere. Mist seeped from between the bars of a wrought-iron grate cap sealing the deeper section of the tunnel. A little stream of sewage-piss babbled through its lower half and dripped into the pool below like hot batter through a strainer.

Taliopia had resorted to dry heaves by this point. She'd vomited at least three times, and apparently had nothing left in her stomach. The Fallen actually felt bad for her. That was hard to come by, especially with strangers for him. But watching the dainty, white dragoness cry silently as she leaned on Morinth for support, her mouth open and reams of saliva leaking from her, he allowed a frown to befall his features.

Maybe he'd buy them both dinner somewhere. Did Warfang have restaurants?

He opened his mouth to ask, but thought better of it.

They were knee-deep in monkey shit. Who the hell wanted to talk about food?

"This actualleh ain't so bad." Palmet said, picking chunks of something horrible out of his arm fur as he waded through the sludge. The Ape didn't look in the slightest bit disturbed by his surroundings. They were truly disgusting creatures who lived in filth for business _and_ pleasure. Walking rats, really. "Before you two fried Drulop to a crisp, my whole mob was a collective piss-show of complainin sods. I was actually plannin on given myself a promotion."

"How does an _Ape_ promote oneself? Don't you need Cynder to do that?" Torrdonal asked, his teeth bunched around the end of the sack he and Corrinthol were floating through the muck behind them.

"Don't collude with the enemy." Harad half-heartedly muttered, grimacing at his sludge-stained breastplate.

"Nah nah, Cynder don't handle civil affairs like that. Ya get promoted if ya knife your current CO in the back and live to tell the tail. Once you do that, all the other boys listen to ya cause you're obviously stronger and more intellectual." Palmet plucked a thumb-sized fly out of the air and popped it in his mouth, crunching loudly as he talked. "That's how Ape society functions day ta day, understand. It makes things a lot more simple and less complicated-like."

The Fallen was listening to this with amusement written all over his face. He'd read Cynder and her little army like an opened book. Evil warlords were all the same, maintaining this complicated network of treachery like it was a gigantic spiderweb. Those things never lasted.

"You guys must not have healthcare either." Spyra crinkled her snout as Palmet swallowed, and offered a hideous belch. "I've got the table manners of a cow, but that's just gross."

"Nah, Cynder never even put out a proppa retirement plan. Usually, when the boys get close to the right age for something like that, someone takes advantage of their old, feeble limbs during a feast, and shanks em! Steals their poultry too." Palmet made a stabbing motion with his wrist. "Did that to my father! Good ole' paps. He blubbered like a fish when I stuck him right through the left lung."

Taliopia's wheezing silenced as she gaped at the Ape in horror.

"-_Y-You killed your daddy?_" She squeaked.

"Yep!" Palmet nodded enthusiastically. "_Stabby-stab! _Buncha times right through the rear muscle, here, unda da pit. Works best ta keep the victim from screamin."

"He's not wrong." The Fallen said.

Taliopia vomited a fourth time. Poor Morinth had run out of patience and could only softly rub circles between her wing joints.

"We can't use dynamite on the cap." The Fallen hiked up the dripping pipe's ledge at knee-height, standing in the ten-or-so feet that the pipe's interior offered. "Ignitia?"

"Gladly." The Guardian flapped her wings and hopped from the sewage, shivering as she glanced down at her drenched forepaws and feet. "_*huff* _I will never be able to get this smell out of my coat."

"Still smells like a bakery to me." Spyra sniffed at her, snorting. "Y'know, a bakery with its latrine overflowing in the back, but a bakery nonetheless."

Ignitia sighed in defeat and trotted to the grate. Harad came up next, then Morinth and the very sickly Taliopia. Harad had to turn around and help Corrinthol and Torrdonal heave the dynamite sack from the water.

"If I live to see the end of today, I will never complain about cesspit duty ever again, for as long as I live." Harad admitted, looking down at Torrdonal, who was shivering uncontrollably. "What is wrong with you?"

"_W-Water. It's all over me. It's everywhere! It's going to drown me!_" Torrdonal shrieked, his eyes wild and- somehow –staring in two separate directions. He looked like a dog having a nervous breakdown as it watched its master throw out the whole bag of treats. "_I need my happy place!_"

"Here's a happy place." The Fallen stomped over and yanked one of his horns, snarling in his ear-hole: "_I'll break your neck if you don't pipe down._"

Harad growled and shouldered the human back.

"That second test of meddles gets closer every moment you're around us." The earth dragon glowered. "I was just about to discipline him _myself._"

"I'm too decent a guy to deserve being stuck in this hell." Corrinthol dryly said to no one as he doted on his explosives sack, his tail thumping on the stone of the pipe. He didn't bother to help Palmet as the Ape scrabbled on the edge of the pipe's lip, falling back in a number of times before finally slumping onto the walkway inside, dripping, like a wet mop.

"_I survived!_" He proclaimed in a sputter. "Don't nobody worry none."

"Shame. I was kinda' hoping he'd of drowned." Spyra laid an elbow on the Fallen's head and tapped her talons on her chin with a heavy sigh. "Fallen, could you drown your new butler? He sucks."

"_Drowning!_" Torrdonal shrieked.

"Depends on his concierge and waiter service. Do you know how to prepare a martini, Palmet?" The Fallen raised a brow.

"The bloody crap is a _mar-teen-niez?_" Palmet blinked like a moron.

"_Ha! _I can already see all the bubbles." Spyra wiggled her fingers.

"Captain," Ignitia closed her mouth and cut off a wavering pillar of fire. The whole grate cap was glowing orange, the air around it wavering like the surface of a sun. Nobody had even heard her superheating the metal. It looked like an illuminated checkerboard in the dark. "the floor is yours."

Harad cleared some space and tucked into a ball. There was a crack of earth and a magically conjured boulder of green rock materialized around his body, pressing the whole party to the edges of his proximity. He rolled and smacked into the grate with a clash of sparks, ripping it free to flatten beneath his girth.

"Get inside." He called, the boulder turning to dust as he reappeared on the other side.

"_That'd be a lot cooler if he wasn't such a dick._" Spyra whispered to the Fallen. "You think I could learn how to do that?"

"Indeed you could." Ignitia warmly interjected, sidling beside the human as they passed over the crushed, cooling grate. "As the Purple Dragoness, Spyra, you have the ability to more quickly adhere to elements than other dragons. Most of our kind never are able to cast another power outside of their birth element their entire lives."

"I tried to learn fire once." Torrdonal mouthed over the sack as he and Corr' tugged. "I accidentally set my sister's nest aflame."

"You have _sisters?_" The Fallen went bug-eyed. "Please tell me they're single, and twins."

"You are disgusting." Harad paused up ahead.

"And proud."

The pipe was relatively short, walking only took a minute at the most. The air immediately changed to a warmer, glummer sort. The smell was horrid, but they had been traveling through it long enough that a kind of sick familiarity had set in.

The pipe disgorged into a large, egg-shaped dome chamber that was otherwise dark, save for the green glow around the waste pool making its center. Ancient brickwork and chiseled walls were overrun with vines and shrooms. The ceiling was too high up to perceive through the shadows, and what had once been an amber crystal chandelier had fallen and was gathering rust in the center of the waste pool just ahead of them. The gems were reacting to being submerged and were actually making the pool glow its native color.

_Green._

Even the miasma of mist wavering over their heads was the same shade.

"This place is a dump!" Spyra cried. "Did the ancients enjoy shitty floor-plans, or were times that different?"

"The ancients did not do this. You can thank the Apes for such lovely redecoration." Ignitia swept her snout about with displeasure. "Over there, do you all see those doors? The orbs all must be lit for them to open. This must have once been a disposal chamber for Forlorn before it fell. Look for switches or runes."

They waded out of the shallow mirth and stood in the greater chamber beyond. Corrinthol and Torrdonal dragged the dynamite sack out and let it rest, both of them heaving against its side for support.

Taliopia flopped on the nearest clear patch of stone flooring she could find and closed her eyes, occasionally spitting to rid herself of the taste of her own puke. Morinth sadly doted on her and picked at her sopping paws.

"Alright." The Fallen tore his gaze from them and turned to the doors as Spyra hopped off his back. "Looks like it's up to us, Spyra."

"Ain't it always?" She hip-bumped him. "I think I see something over there! You check that corner, I'll check this one."

"While you lot figure how to open them doors, just watch out for the _Sewer Moana._" Palmet slithered out of the muck and shook himself like a dog. "That's why the boys always lock the doors when they're done dumpin the latrine pots! That fing will eat us."

The Fallen paused as he checked a pillar nearby.

"I don't see anything." He shrugged. "There isn't enough space for something that powerful to hide. Unless, don't tell me: the _Sewer Moaner_ is an errant gnome or something? It would not surprise me, I've found stupider."

"Spyra, you have expertise on the local fauna." Ignitia called across the chamber, feeling up a wall for any hidden switches. "Any suggestions?"

"…_Ahhhhhhmmm…_" Spyra sheepishly let her tail sway. "…Can't be Bulb Spiders, they'd have jumped us already. No giant mosquitos, just a lot of regular ones…"

The Fallen slapped his neck roughly nearby, cursing.

"…Badgers, nah too picky, Toadworts, no too stupid, Growths, can't be they're too fat… That leaves…"

Palmet screamed, and a terrifyingly morose wail echoed around the whole chamber. It sounded like a strange blend of a person in agony and a dying ox. It was wholly disturbing enough to turn even the Fallen's head.

"What, the hell, was _that?_' He muttered.

"_It's da Sewa Moana!_" Palmet shrieked. "_Run fer yer lives!_"

The goop flooding the pool made a popping noise, and something the size of a small dog flew out with the speed of a bullet. It opened, like a dark hand, fingers and all, and latched onto Palmet's back with a wet _slap~!_

The Ape tossed onto the ground and hollered.

"_-It's eatin my spine!_" He screamed. "-_Eeeelllllpppp~!_"

The Fallen cleared a boulder patch in a single jump, landed next to the Ape and clapped a hand over the organism pulsating on his furry back.

Another wail blared out from the mass of glistening, black and slimy flesh. It uncurled from the Ape's hide and latched onto the Fallen's wrist like a vice. He grunted and stepped back, instinctively swinging his arm in a wide arc to try and dislodge the horror.

"_Fallen!_" Spyra barked, bounding over, her mouth ajar as flame broiled past her teeth. "_I'll roast it!_"

"Like _hell_ you will!" The Fallen barked, now wrenching the afflicted limb away from the angry dragoness. She'd surely torch the monster _and_ his arm. He couldn't win a war with a stick of charcoal for a prosthetic.

One last swing saw the Fallen's wrist smash into one of the boulders lying around. There was a _crunch! _–as the little beast's tentacled form met the stone harshly. This time, it produced a shrill kind of squeak, the Fallen grunting as it unclenched from him and slapped onto the floor like a used wipe.

"Little fucker." He simmered, rubbing his wrist as he backed away from the writhing mass of limbs wiggling like a black stain on the ground. "_Now_ you can torch it."

"What is it?" Morinth recoiled in horror.

"_It's- It's-_" Taliopia took in a massive inhale, and shouted: "-_EVILLLLLLL~!_"

-The poor girl had had a rough afternoon.

"Alright ya'll," Spyra gave a little tang and spit an ember before winking. "step back, the dial's cranked to eleven!"

Just then:

"**_meep._**"

….Everyone paused.

"…Did anyone else hear that?" Spyra still had flames licking past her chops as she spoke, her golden breast was glowing molten. She coughed. "-_Agh~! _Jeez, heartbu-!"

"Wait a second." The Fallen touched her wing. Spyra went cross-eyed and her cheeks bulged. The poor human cringed and held his arms up. "-_Jesus Holy Christ, don't hold it in like that!_"

"_Bleeegghhhh~!_" –Spyra keeled over a rock and belched a plume of fiery backwash. It rushed like an elemental breeze and singed a cloister of mushrooms into ash. "-_*cough-cough* -Ouch~!_" Spyra wailed, rubbing her own throat and hacking. "-_Son of a bitch, it's like I swallowed a whole spicy burrito entirely wrong! I take it back! Those Mana Crystals are _horrible,_ wretched- *cough* -creations of hell!_"

"I'm gathering it's normally not that… _voluminous._" The Fallen carefully placed a hand on her purple back and patted.

" _No-!_" –Was all the poor dragoness could choke.

"Has everyone just forgotten about the spine-eating thing that almost took the Fallen's arm off?" Morinth quirked a brow.

"Too bad it didn't." Corrinthol tore away from the sack. "Hold on, guys, let the professional handle matters here…"

The red dragon's breast lit up, just like Spyra's, his flames highlighting his toothy grin.

"**_MEEP!_**" –The black hand-shaped abomination darted off the floor and attached itself across Corrinthol's face, sounding like a suction cup adhering to glass.

**_sssSSHCLP~!_**

Corrinthol started screaming. But they all could hear was one, muffled, continuous and shrill note. The red dragon tossed around in agony, clawing ineffectively at his snout as he rolled on the chamber floor with abandon.

"Don't all of you just stand there and look at him, _help him!_" Harad barked.

"I'm not touching that thing." Morinth crinkled her nose, doing exactly that, _watching_ Corrinthol toss around like a ragdoll as the thing most likely chomped on his face like a fucking midday snack. "_Plus_ some casualties aren't exactly crippling."

"_Morinth!_"

"Hold on, Corr', I'll save you!" Torrdonal hurried over and slapped a claw wetly on the center of the black iris spreading over his comrade's snout. "Gotchya!"

"**_meep!_**" –Squeaked the little thing. It looked like an octopus this close up, with eight tentacles spreading out from a goop-covered, inky and round center body. Torrdonal gasped when just between two of his talons, a big, gaping, terrified and yellow glowing eye blinked back at him.

"-_It's looking at me._" The water drake froze.

"Stick a- _bleghhhhhh~!_" –Spyra fire-vomited again, sending an even bigger jet of flames traveling across to the pool in the center. "-_pin in it! Oh- gawd-…._"

Ignitia trotted over, pinning Corrinthol by the breast with one of her paws. The poor soldier grunted in pain through the tentacles of the creature, his stomach rising and falling rapidly in panic. The inky octopus-creature wriggled as Corr' gripped two of its tentacles, unable to pull it off.

It blinked at Ignitia, giving off another innocent-sounding- "**_Meep!_**" –this one sounding almost excited, like the sound a kitten would make after first tasting milk.

"A curious creature…" Ignitia hummed, leaning down lower to squint at it. "…but completely harmless."

"_What?_" Harad stormed over and looked down at Corrinthol in horror. "Ancestors, you call that _harmless?_ It's eating his face!"

"Not so much eating as simply _attaching._" Ignitia noted the suction-cups lining the creature's tentacles as they wriggled over Corrinthol's face. The young dragon's eye was exposed for a second, rolling around in panic before locking on Ignitia with a pleading expression.

Back in the academy, Corrinthol had done nothing in her classes but stare at her backside and giggle like a preschooler. That wasn't including all the incidents involving parchment spitballs, or that one time a fire had started in the cafeteria.

Needless to say, Corr' was the one with a problem here, and Ignitia was obligated to solve jack shit.

Besides, examining the stinky little tentacle monster was entirely fascinating.

Dare she even say…

"It is actually sort of… _cute._" Ignitia giggled, poking the little creature's black body. It squeaked and jostled, apparently very ticklish. Ignitia snorted and pinched her snout. "And very poorly smelling. It must live in the reservoir here."

"Huh," Palmet had collected himself off the ground and knelt to peer at the little thing. "-so _dat's_ the Sewa Moana? It ain't so scary."

"As I said, it is harmless." Ignitia carefully stroked around its yellow eye, and the tiny octopus shivered in delight.

Corrinthol's jaw flexed and a muffled sentence drew out. Probably something along the lines of: _bitch, get this thing off my face. _Ignitia ignored him and tickled the monster's flank, giggling when it chirped like a bird.

"Not dangerous at all, bearing semblance of intelligence, and…" Ignitia ran a claw through the air in a series of loops, watching as the yellow eye tracked her paw. "…cognitively well developed. I'd say the noises we were hearing earlier were a defense mechanism, nothing more."

"…So can we kill it?" Spyra slapped her chops as she hobbled from the rocks, leaning on the Fallen for support. "Remind me to never hold in flames like that again. _Nevva'._"

"Mentally noted." The Fallen rubbed her wing. "Do we know what it is?"

"Not in the slightest." Ignitia stood back as the creature eased off Corr's face. The flame soldier gasped as tentacles slapped off his chops and his nose, allowing him to breathe.

"**_Meep!_**" The land-octopus chirped, using its limbs like spiderlegs to traverse down Corrinthol's breast to the ground. It crawled towards Ignitia, holding out two tentacles. "**_Meep! Meep!_**"

"Dafuck is it doing?" Spyra blinked.

"I think it wants you to pick it up, mam." Morinth grinned, nudging the Guardian with her wing. "_Up-Up, mummy, _see? What it's doing with its little tentacles? Cheeky that, it smells like a corpse, but the little bugger's adorable."

"**_Meep!_**"

"_Oh! _Me? No, nonono that's not necessary…" Ignitia stepped back quickly. "Besides, we have no time for this! We're in _Cynder's Tower,_ for Ancestor's sake…"

"Dat's awright there little fella, come ere." Palmet stepped in and scooped the stinking land-octopus up in his furry arms, cradling it as it squeaked and chirped, blinking at him with its glowing yellow eye. "_Dawwww_ look at im, he's got these little _eye-dimples_ right on the sides ere. He's a ripe beaut this one, got everyone with them wailing sounds, he did. Everyone in the camp's terrified of a little black dot! Believe that?"

The Ape wiggled his finger under its eye. The octopus batted at his finger playfully with its limbs.

"Can I keep im?" Palmet hugged it protectively to his chest.

"I think I am going to be ill." Harad shut his eyes and huffed.

"They both smell the same at least, just one looks like a donkey that got bashed by an ugly stick, and the other's a tar-ball." Morinth shrugged. "Perfect fit."

"Yeah, he does have a little bit of an ursine-like curve to his eyeball right ere don't he?" Palmet giggled.

"Does being this stupid require a lot of effort for you? Like, is your retardism a _strain, _or do you just _do it?_ Like breathing?" Spyra shook her head incredulously.

The amber gems embedded in the closed gateway doors suddenly lit up.

"I found the switch." The Fallen called over, reclining from a rusty lever sticking out of the archway frame.

"I'm gonna name him _Meep._" Palmet grinned. "He's got a Meep-ish look abou him."

"**_Meep!_**"

"Dah-haaa! Dats right, little Meep, I'm right ere."

* * *

{🐉}

"Oi, watch yer trail."

"Sorreez."

The Ape on the left nudged over a step and adjusted his urine stream from the other's foot. He hadn't gotten much sleep, fooling around with one of the camp whores last night, so every time he stood still he started to lose focus.

Side by the side, they drained their furry lizards into one of the many refuse puddles gridding the wrecked courtyard surrounding the gates to the drainage room, the one leading to Shit's Creak. They had their backs to the doors.

"Is it normal ta piss this long?"

"I dunno, maybe yu got a disease or somethin."

"But you're pissin dis long too!"

"Well, maybe yu infected me, you rotter. Somethin's wrong with your Willy."

"There ain't nothin wrong with me _Willy_ ya uncivilized baboon! Maybe it's _your _Willy that's got something wrong with it!"

"Figur dat, chum?"

"Mine's definitely bigga."

"_No._ Mine. See?" The other lined them both up, piss streams now flying everywhere. "I've got at least an inch and a _half_ on ya, ya little tree-simian. What'd you use dat spear for, pleasin a squirrel?"

"Yu bastard! I oughtta-"

The fight didn't last any longer. A blade opened the first one's throat, and a pair of talons raked open the other's. The two Apes choked and gurgled, collapsing when a shoulder and a pair of horns sent them tumbling into the puddle with two muted splashes.

"…W-Were they…?" Spyra whispered with a terrible cringe.

"I don't want to know." The Fallen shuddered.

"_Psst~!_" Morinth waved them both over to a towering mound of rubble. "_Guys, look at this!_"

The atrium of Forlorn was immense. To the Fallen, it resembled the size of a football stadium, completely closed in with a gothic-carved, hole-ridden roof. Just ahead of them sprawled a massive chamber littered with Ape camps, makeshift highways for wagons trawling about and gantries crisscrossing the walls penning it all in like veins on skin.

Bonfires were glowing balls of light among little ponds of tents and huts. The Apes charred impaled corpses of Giant Anteaters, giant mosquitos, Bulb Spiders, one fire had another _Ape_ roasting over it. Poor slob must have pissed off an officer.

"There's _hundreds_ of them." Spyra mumbled in wonder, ducking down when the Fallen caught her mid-rise and compressed her back.

"Easily a thousand plus change." Harad grimly noted, his drab eyes scanning the campsites. "This is definitely where Cynder has been basing her entire army. There's enough Apes in this tower to cover a small front."

"Morri-poo? What are you all looking at over that ridgeline? Lemme see too! Scootch!"

"_No, _wait my love, I don't think-"

Taliopia's wide grin left her snout. She took one look at the atrium floor and fainted on the rubble, her pink eyes rolling back in her head.

"…_Oh._" Morinth pinched her brow in defeat. "…_The things we dooooo forrrr loooovvvveeee~…._"

"It's looking at me again…" Torrdonal cringed when the octopus- now affectionately named _Meep_ by Palmet –blinked at him over the latter's shoulder.

"**_Meep!_**"

"You can only keep that thing if it's _quiet._" The Fallen growled.

"Sorry, boss." Palmet sheepishly patted the octopus until it burrowed into his back hair and settled with a contented little squeak, scattering the variety of fleas that had been nesting there previously. Torrdonal looked sick.

"The first part of your plan has so far proven successful." Harad said the word tentatively, like he was breaking the sentence apart to search for imperfections. The Fallen grinned at him and nodded. "What comes next?"

"Ignitia?" The Fallen gestured for her.

"There are support pillars that make the backbone of Forlorn's structure. I remember reading of them in several design specifications from the academy's library. There are three of them, located there, there, and over there." Ignitia used a talon to point to three separate, massive pylons built into the atrium's rounded walls. One was to the west, just a short distance away, another to the east, a fair distance, and a last to the north, on the complete opposite side of the massive chamber. "The dynamite we have gathered should be ample enough to bring down all of them, thus causing the central dais over the chamber's heart to collapse in on itself, causing the entire chute and all thirty to forty stories of stairs and amphitheater cells, including Cynder's lair at the very top, to come crashing down into Forlorn's center."

"And there's hot forges and dynamite caches lying around like hard candy." Spyra observed several of the scrap-towers linking networks of forge stations to smokestacks poking through the atrium's roof. "When the chute smashes its way in here the reactive burst is gonna' be, like, _epic._ Mushroom-cloud epic. It'll ruin that emo dyke's day for sure."

"We'll have to rely on smuggling the dynamite to each pillar foundation." The Fallen explained. "Once the first goes off, me and Spyra are going to cause a fight, a _real big _fight, one that will draw in the majority of the tower's garrison to one point. It'll be up to Ignitia and Harad to lead the Wing and get the explosives to the other two foundations while we hold them off."

"_No._" Ignitia quickly laid a claw on Spyra's shoulder. "I will not rely on the Purple Dragoness as a diversion. Spyra is not expendable."

"Who said anything about expendable?" Spyra scoffed. "I'm the bee's-knees, lady, those Apes can't even control where they put their nasty fingers, forget stopping a fully armed dragoness and her alien-boi'."

"Wait." Morinth pointed. "What about them?"

"…._Oh._" The Fallen mumbled, following her gaze. "God damn it, I forgot about them."

"The prisoners!" Ignitia dragged a claw down her face.

Nearby a troupe of Moles, stout, freakishly short rodent people bedecked in rags were led by a pair of larger Apes wielding whips. They were carrying brooms and cleaning equipment of all sorts, being escorted towards the center of the massive atrium.

There was a large double flight of stairs that wound into a hurricane-like chute up into the eye of the atrium's roof. One set went up, the other descended into a railed alcove going to the tower's basement level. The Moles were being brought back to the latter.

"Aye, dat's where the Moley peepol are being held." Palmet reached behind himself to stroke Meep. "And it's awfully ironic that yer bringing down the observatory on all dis. Literally a paradox that. Usin Cynder's knowledge to bust up her own house! Yu guys are a trip."

"Cynder's knowledge?" Ignitia glanced at him.

"Oiaye, all her knickknacks and such, loads-a-books and scrolls and all other kinds of doohickeys that none of the lads could even read. Me included. It's all written in drag script."

"The Library of the Temple!" Ignitia squealed, gripping the little sash bag on her hip with a gasp. "That's where all the records they didn't burn or lose went! Cynder has been hoarding them this whole time."

"That explains why the temple is so devoid of relics." Harad snorted. "Malefora's gift to her errant champion. Those records belong to Warfang."

"Certainly," Ignitia popped open the sash and shoved the burnt, ancient scraps she had inside into a corner, revealing a large portion of room inside. "-I'm sure Cynder has all manner of storage apparatus in that observatory. I can recover the library in a single move."

"It isn't worth it." The Fallen darkly said. "Baubles are not equal to your life, Ignitia."

"What you may call _baubles_ is in fact a collection of some of the oldest, original records written by the Ancestors themselves." Ignitia said with offense. "Pre-dating the settlement of Stormwatch, the texts that all dragons have studied in our history since our nation's conception. The founding documents of who we are. I will not let the enemy steal them from us again."

"I knew a man who had a choice once," The Fallen straightened up, grinding his teeth. "between saving his entire world, or the people born on it. He was given the option of preserving one, but not the other. Do you know that he actually hesitated?"

"Who wouldn't?" Harad blinked.

"I wouldn't." The Fallen snapped. "The person who stepped forward and made that decision for him was _me._ I watched a world die, but I kept its people from meeting a similar fate. No object, place or thing, no matter how sentimental, is worth sacrificing innocent or good life for. Let it go."

"What right have you to make decisions for worlds not of your own?" Ignitia defended. "This is our realm, our existence, our politics and our war. You breathe our air and fight on battlefields consecrated in _our_ blood. I will not tolerate you speaking to me in such a pretentious matter on things beyond your obligations! The papers are _our_ responsibility."

"And doing the right thing is _mine._" The Fallen shook his head.

"I thought this war wasn't _your_ problem?" Spyra asked. "Remember what you said to me? When you first came down? When did that change, big guy?"

"I…" The Fallen turned on her with a dark look in his eyes, but faltered, cutting himself off with a winded breath. "…I spoke out of turn. I was _angry._ There are missions I was on before I crashed here. But they aren't going anywhere, and they can wait. I'm here now, whether I want to be or not. I'm not going to just let you do this."

"And why? Pray tell? Because your decision making is more important than ours?" Ignitia scoffed.

"_Yes!_" The Fallen barked. "Yes it fucking is! I've traveled to too many worlds just to watch people tear themselves apart because of hubris, ignorance and half a truckload's other shit that in the long run is _meaningless._ Territorial disputes, hatred because people sound or look different, anger from trivial things of little to no impact, the needless preservation of _objects and material wealth._ Yes I do know better than you, because I have bore witness to entire civilizations who have signed their own death warrants for _pieces of paper._ Get it out of your head: your library burned with all those eggs you lost. Just like you can't resurrect the dead, you can't save everything."

Ignitia began to shiver as a terrible, terrible rage befell her. Soot rose from her nostrils and between her fangs as she leaned dangerously close to the human.

"_Eggs? You speak of e-eggs?_" She choked, her voice trembling. "H-How dare you. _How dare you!_ Do you not-"

Ignitia cut herself off and cupped a paw over her snout, a shrill, high pitched sob muffling past her talons. She batted furiously at the first batch of tears and snarled, shaking her head rapidly.

"_No,_ no I will handle this efficiently, and in the way it is meant to be handled, the way my destiny saw it as so." She jammed a talon at him. "You talk of arrogance, when you know not of what you speak. You are a reckless, instigating, and pig-headed little hatchling who has an ego as large as _ten_ of these towers, and I will not stand idle as you lecture me about pain beyond your scope of comprehension."

"My comprehension shouldn't be underestimated." The Fallen got in her face, sneering. "You think I'm basing this off of assumptions. How morosely narrow-sighted of you to say."

"…I think we're losing touch here just a _taadddddd~…._" Morinth sang. "Boys, girls? We have a tower to destroy."

"That's right." The Fallen didn't break eye contact with the Guardian. "So everyone's gotta' pull on their big boy and big girl pants and get to work. The library is not our directive. Our goal is to bring Forlorn down, and wipe out Cynder's army all in one place, so we can end the southern occupation. This is happening- and, read my lips –it's happening _to-day._"

"What about the slaves?" Spyra chimed in. "-_Shit,_ I just upped the difficulty meter, I can already feel it."

Ignitia looked like she wanted to rip the Fallen in half at the hip. Her eyes portrayed it all. Still, he tore his gaze from her fiery staring and glanced at Spyra, then the stairs off in the distance.

"…I have a plan."

"Yippee, lemme' take a guess. Or, you could just spit it out." Spyra nudged him with her snout. "Tell me."

"You're not going to like it." The human said. "But it has to work."

He glanced back at Ignitia and Harad.

"I hope you people can work quickly."

* * *

{🐉}

Before he killed his victim, the Fallen had to wonder:

What the hell was with the feathers?

He had a perplexed expression even as the blade sunk through squelching flesh and caused a beating flow of crimson to spread down the Ape's chest like a stain on linen.

The soldier gargled on his own vital fluids and collapsed into a twitching heap. He was wearing a collection of string necklaces tethered with all kinds of feathers and dried, tropical-looking leaves. Several patches of fur had been shaven off his arms to display tattoos depicting runic symbols of an alien alphabet, and a vest made of red leather cure was underneath his usual Apish attire.

"These ones are from the north." Torrdonal specified. "Ape tribes in the north, under leadership of Jute the Boisterous, decorate themselves with fern leaves and parrot feathers. The Dragon Council thinks it's because they view those things as luck charms, or the like. My history is a little fuzzy since the academy."

"He isn't called _the Boisterous,_ it's Jute the _Terrible_." Corrinthol dragged the sack with difficulty. "Professor Cyrila had a hard spot for those lesser monkeys. I think she said it was because she fought against them more than any of the other Guardians."

"She is a very strong kind of lady." Torrdonal smiled dreamily. The Fallen cringed and kicked the corpse at his feet away.

"The both of you are like a pair of degenerate, hormonal boys." He muttered. "Bring the dynamite over here. We're about to begin the act…"

"What would a trickster like you know?" Corrinthol let go of the sack and sat on his haunches. "I noticed that you can't seem to beat any of us _dragons_ without buttering us up before swooping in for the kill. Is that what a brave warrior like yourself does? You lie, and bluff without actually doing anything to back it all up? Who's pathetic now? Huh? _Huh?_"

The Fallen stepped over to the sack and gingerly slid a bandolier of sticks free from its contents. He smiled pleasantly at Corrinthol for a minute, hugging the sticks to his thin, suited chest.

"Did they have vision tests at the academy?" The Fallen asked politely.

"Oh of course! The military is very keen on health examinations to make sure its soldiers are in prime shape for aerial maneuvers and-" Torrdonal babbled to silence when the human slowly turned to face him, like a tortoise emerging from its shell. The Fallen's smile frightened him. It was a predatory smile. It probably had something to do with what had transpired just a little while ago… "…I-I can stay quiet, if that works better for everyone."

"I like you, Torrdonal."

Torrdonal yipped when the Fallen clapped a hand on his blue, scaley shoulder and squeezed.

"You know when the shit is about to hit the fan, _and_ when you're stepping in other people's business. Barring that, allow me to give you an example of what happens to folks who are less blessed with perception like yours." The Fallen dropped the dynamite back into the sack, and wrung his knuckles together, cracking them, before serenely adjusting himself. "I ask about the vision tests, because I question something about you, Corr': are you _blind?_"

"Do I _look_ it, _hoo-man?_" Corrinthol exposed his fangs and sat up on his haunches, actually coming to half-a-head taller than the Fallen as he leaned over the boom-sack and snarled.

"Do _they_ look like I buttered them up with trickery and bluffs before I fucked them?" The Fallen swept a wrist around the chamber. Flipped wooden tables hid only _some_ of the dead, and arterial splashes decorated many of the cold walls with stylistic spatters and clashes against stone and wood.

A whole cadre of maybe thirty or forty Apes acted as macabre décor for this barracks now, several of them loosely draped over whatever furniture they had smashed through, blades, spears and crossbolts jutting from their bleeding cadavers like pins and needles on porcupines.

Corrinthol was silent for a moment, but the Fallen picked out his umber wings twitching behind him. The human smiled, not intimidated in the least.

"You really don't have a clue about just _who_ I am, don't you?" He chortled.

Corrinthol opened his mouth to answer, but the Fallen cut him off.

A hand clasped the drake's throat and _squeezed,_ making Corr' wheeze out dramatically, his limbs flailing in a jolting singular movement. He resembled a frightened frog being yanked from the fresh bucket by an eager Frenchman.

"Thank you for volunteering!" The Fallen sang, stomping over the bloodstained floor towards a shanty wooden wall. "_You_ get to make us an exit!"

Corrinthol swiped at the Fallen with his vicious claws, but by then it was far too late.

The Fallen heaved, his thin arm muscles bulging as he loosed Corr's weight, and chucked the fire drake right through the wall.

**_Smash~! _**–the poorly stapled lumber splintered into a million pieces and rained down on the muddy aisle below.

* * *

**_{Halo 2 Anniversary OST: Heretic, Hero and Zealous Champion Remix}_**

* * *

Tens of Apes lumbering about ceased their treks, noses upturned to watch a screaming, flailing, crimson lizard tumble two stories from the barracks block.

To give him credit, Corrinthol at least tried to unfurl his wings. He landed on a storage cart before he could get a single flap in edgewise.

And the cart was stuffed with _Toadworts,_ evidently, ones awaiting butchering to feed the Apes' rampant appetites.

The cart flattened beneath the dragon and splinters, Toadwort limbs and globs of leaking meat-juice flew everywhere in a cloud of dust.

"Is he going to be okay?" Torrdonal shivered as he peered around the Fallen's flank.

"I dunno' if _any_ of us are going to be okay by the end of this." The Fallen grunted as he shouldered the lessened sack of dynamite, grinning at the water drake with a cheap look. "What say you that we give things a spin and see where it takes us?"

Torrdonal swallowed. The Apes in the campsite below started bellowing and hooting.

"Is this where things go _boom?!_" Palmet shouted, jumping up from where he and Meep had been looting the corpse of a disemboweled officer. He pointed at the back wall of the barracks, where a massive, cracked, stone block made up the rear spine of the shanty building's makeup. The Apes had basically encrusted the first pillar's base with it, after all.

"Oh yes." The Fallen snapped a fuse off a stick and tossed it over his shoulder, the hissing dynamite clattering quietly among a stacked pile up against the stonework. "_Boom._"

The Fallen jumped with a wild cry, and Torrdonal gasped as he spread his wings and leaped after him. Palmet wasn't far behind, hooting whilst he followed his new companions out the fresh breach.

_The weight's a problem._

The Fallen landed on his heels and rolled through the soggy earth, cleaver slipping off his waist and into his grip.

_But I can manage._

"_It's in my mouth!_" Corrinthol whined, scrambling from the cart's remains in disgust. "_It tastes like mud and stuff!_"

"Dem Toadies be considered fine cuisine round these parts!" Palmet cradled Meep in one arm and shook a fist with the other. Some of the other Apes were blinking at him in confusion. "Sorry lads! The gettins were good on the other side."

"_Get your heads down!_" The Fallen slashed an Ape from the midsection, the sack slung over his shoulders swinging like a gigantic tumor as he killed. "_Fire in the hole!_"

The barracks building became a miniature sun.

The explosion was deafening, and Apes lumbering several camps over could feel the reverberations of the blast in their heels and hearts.

A mushroom cloud crawled from the gradually vaporizing corpse of the rectangular scrap-structure as it literally came apart board for board in a singular millisecond of lethal hyperactivity.

**_Bannnnnngggg~! _**–the air quivered and the shockwave knocked down tents for over forty feet. The great pillar marking Forlorn's first rib began to crack, giving off thunderous reports across the whole of the atrium.

Spider limbs worked their way up the several stories making the mighty buttress' length. These cracks ended at the very top, where the dome ceiling itself moaned, and buckled over a triangular wedge extending to nearly half a kilometer.

Chunks of the ceiling fell with hideous snaps, crushing unlucky patrols of Apes, shantytowns of tents, and one of the forge stations. It caused a _secondary_ explosion. One of the smokestacks poking through Forlorn's atrium roof snapped and caved in under its own weight, showering the entire area in a choking tsunami of masonry dust.

Torrdonal, who had been circling overhead, shrieked as the windblast took him by surprise and sent him cartwheeling back down the walkways of the Ape slums below.

The Fallen ran rampant through the confused Apes that had been surrounding them. The dust blinded them and he swept in under their axes and arms, killing at will.

"_That was A-MAZING~!_" Palmet hollered, he'd been thrown a fair distance back and had smashed through a hut's drywall. He was deaf, and so his volume fell upon nothing for him. Meep was doing a strange, tentacled jig atop his head, dust clinging to his slimy, black body in reams. "_Let's do it again!_"

"_Torrdonal, Corrinthol, collect yourselves!_" The Fallen snarled, slicing an Ape bent over his knee across the throat. He slouched the corpse over and heaved the rest of the dynamite, pointing to the east through the dust. "_We're going for the second pillar!_"

"_-Y-You…. YOU-_" Corrinthol hacked, stumbling from the brown and gray haze ringing the area in, he collapsed in a smoking heap just behind the Fallen's boots, his wings singed from the backwash of the explosion. "-_you're out of your mind._"

The Fallen kicked his head back and laughed.

"How do you think I've survived for so long, Corr'?"

"There's a whole squabble of my former lads coming from thatta way!" Palmet jogged over, pointing down one of the dirt aisles. A wave of furry flesh trundled down in their direction, officers mixed in with the rank and file. "Holy shitberries, they look angreh. _Ooo! _Look! There's another mob that way! And another over there! And there, and-" The Ape blinked, and Meep squealed as he hid inside his mane. "-bloody hell, we're all about ta get swamped."

"Not if I have anything to say about it." The Fallen snatched a stick out of his bag. "Palmet, you don't have any reservations about racial traitorism do you?"

Palmet scrunched his nose and peered at the human, waving dust from his face. The world looked like it was in the bowels of a sandstorm at the moment. In the resulting pause, an entire block of huts nearby created a metallic crunch as a piece of the ceiling the size of twenty men fell down and crushed them all in a shattering blast. Palmet didn't seem deterred in his consideration.

"Are yu insinuatin, that I am to be armed with my peepol's own explosives, to in turn hurl said explosives at them and decimate their numbers? All unda the order of the same _hoo-man_ who nearly took my head off just a few hours ago?"

"Hey, at least I let you keep a pet." The Fallen smirked, wiggling the stick at him.

"Ya make a fine point there." Palmet grinned at Meep, who blinked and squeaked. "_Alrite, handitoverhere-!_"

"Atta' boy."

"_This is fer years of bein forced to abide a cast system I ain't evva goin back to!_" Palmet struck the fuse and hurled the stick into a crowd of encroaching Apes. "_The lot of you bottomfeeders can fuck yerselves!_"

**_Bang~! _**–dead Apes went airborne everywhere.

At least today was turning out to be exciting. But, the Fallen wondered, as he charged through the swirling dustbowl invading the atrium's floor…

…How was Spyra doing at the moment?

* * *

{🐉}

The Fallen was right. Spyra didn't like this plan at all.

It meant they had to work separately. She hated it. Somehow, killing bad guys just felt… _emptier_ without the human bellowing beside her.

That was probably just foolish, youth-borne attachment to the alien that now owned her virginity, but she didn't exactly see that as a bad thing.

Frankly, it was surprising nobody else had pieced the taboo act together yet. Or maybe they had, and they just weren't saying anything.

She had come back to the temple with a trail of blood going down her thigh. But it had been easy to pawn off as an Ape's. Maybe Morinth or Taliopia had an inkling, the latter was a healer after all…

_Nah, _Spyra decided as she wrenched her horns back._ Nobody's got a clue._

The Ape she'd impaled slid down the stone like a used wetwipe. The purple dragon flicked blood off her wings and turned to watch Morinth clearing another hallway linking to hers.

There was a rush of flame that erupted, shattering a wooden doorway to cindering splinters along with a trio of Ape corpses flapping among the detritus. Morinth rolled out as a black ball among the chaos, huffing flames through her teeth as she worked her deadly dance, her tailblade flecked with dark gore.

"Any survivors, luv?" The dark dragoness huffed.

"Nah." Spyra looked around at all the mounded Apes she'd barreled through. She had been a bullet through paper. "Buncha' lightweights these ones. What about for you?"

"Just cheeky." Morinth sighed, nursing a light slash wound across her haunch. "They're slavers, these ones, not warriors. I don't think they were expecting competent resistance…"

"Darned shame." Spyra flicked her tail. "Where's Taliopia?"

An Ape came screaming from another archway, it hit a wall and its neck snapped with a sickening **_crrkkk~!_**

Talopia trundled after him, panting heavily.

"…_I…. I…._" She panted. "-_I got one, Morri-poo._"

"Way to go, Tali'!" Morinth's soldierly attitude vanished as the dark dragon swept her up and hugged her. "I'm so proud of you."

"_Really?_" Tali's rosy eyes lit up. She was still wobbly from all the vomiting. Spyra had to give her credit, a kill, after all that? Maybe she wasn't such a pussy after all.

"C'mon, this way!" Spyra pointed down a tunnel. "I hear more Apes, and something else too."

"_Moles._" Morinth confirmed, putting Taliopia down. "I'd recognize those nasally little voices anywhere. We have to save them!"

"Let's do it, sister." Spyra winked.

"_It's the purple drag!_" The largest slaver-Ape hollered when they cleared the next chamber. He cracked a whip, sending a cadre of smaller Apes scurrying ahead with knives and clubs. "Kill her!"

Spyra answered him by bathing the whole lot of them in a beam of stark electricity. The dark catacomb tunnels flashed white, like it was day, and the Apes' hoots became shrill cries of pain. After that, it was all sizzling flesh and collapsing cadavers. Spyra snickered sparks over her fangs as she glided over them.

"H-How did you do that?" Morinth was flabbergasted. "Nobody taught you a second element!"

"I got mad skills or some shit." Spyra wing-shrugged. "It's through this door, here."

Spyra checked the wooden door off its hinges via an affectionate kiss of her horns. Leaping through the dust, she was forced to skid to a halt, nearly running over a shuffling pond of what at first appeared to be giant rats.

Spyra blinked, and a whole mess of Moles blinked back. There were women, children and men, all emaciated, and clothed in rags and loincloths. One of them fell to her knees and pointed at the dragon.

"_It's the Purple Dragon!_"

Gasps wrung out across the crowd, Spyra swallowing as she backed out of the cell. The Moles all shuffled closer to get a better look at her, one of them reached out with his grubby little paw and tried to touch her. She hissed and reclined from his reach.

"The fuck is it with people? Why is their first reaction to put their nasty hands all over me?!" Spyra snapped, shoving Morinth in between her and the awestruck slaves. "_Mediator! _Help a lost foreigner out here and talk to these people!"

"_Settle down, please, everyone! _Oi! Stop shoving and listen up!" Morinth announced, spreading her wings and tilting them for silence. "The soldiers of Warfang have come to liberate you, but we need your help! Tell us where the others are being kept! At any second now, our comrades on the surface are going to start destroying the tower, so we can escape in the confu-"

The whole underground rumbled with a staccato boom of thunder. Dust fell from the gothic arches and ceiling, and some chains hanging off the cell walls riggled loudly. Some of the infant Moles began to cry, their mothers shushing and rocking them in panic.

"-_right,_ cheeky that of them to just give it a whirl…" Morinth snarled at the ceiling, and hoarsely shrieked. "-_WHILE WE'RE STILL DOWN HERE!_"

Paw-falls bounced off the stone outside. Spyra turned and saw Harad bounding down the way they had come, he had a cluster of five Moles flanking him, they were wielding Ape blades they had looted.

"Is that another cell?" The Captain breathed, peering at the crowd inside. "Cynder has been cramming _families_ in that tiny chamber?"

"Look, these people could make thimbles the next cost-effective gauntlet, buddy, they ain't usin' much space…" Spyra rolled her eyes. "If the Fallen's detonated the first pillar, we still have two to go. _Alright everyone,_ rats, Moles, mice, whatever the hell you identify as, _swing yo dicks_ and sprint! This whole tower's gonna' come down and ruin Cyndy-Two-Shoes' fuckin' day, and I _don't_ want to be right under it when it happens!"

* * *

{🐉}

Cynder outpaced Visigoth _and_ Jute. It was pretty impressive, seeing as Jute's mount, the armored, infamous Dreadwing named _Charlee_ had been picked for the Chieftain purely because he had been the most vicious member of his brood, and the _fastest._ Stupid name or not, Charlee could beat a northern wind. Visigoth had seen it, back when his tribe was still heavily intermeshed with the northerners.

As the war had gone on, their differences had done nothing but further separate the clans. They operated as entirely different entities most years now. Flying alongside Jute on a lent Dreadwing brought back memories. Some of them weren't so pleasant.

Jute had the title: _the Boisterous,_ for reasons Visigoth had no desire to meddle in or understand. But then again, the Moles also knew him as _the Terrible,_ so at least there was something redeeming about his deviancy and troublesome habits…

Visigoth snarled and rung the reins of his mount, the monster shuddering underneath him as the wind whipped his unkempt mane into a flame-like frenzy behind him, exposing his ripped musculature to the breeze.

Cynder was a black dart in the sky, bloody wings flapping. He stared at her for a moment as they beelined back to Forlorn.

His throat still ached from the temple. Visigoth grit his teeth. He _hated_ dragons.

Jute called out over the wind and pointed over Charlee's horned helm. He couldn't understand what his fellow warlord was saying over the draft, but the meaning was clear.

Forlorn was just ahead, a towering spear sticking out of the Funguswood.

Just then, black smoke burst from one of the atrium's corners. A smokestack collapsed into the structure, and soot began to rise from the crumbling gap.

He couldn't have hoped to hear Jute or himself, but he heard Cynder.

She _roared._

And it echoed across the whole swamp.

* * *

{🐉}

Fighting in the dusty hell certainly was one way of covering his tracks. He didn't think better of it before the moment, but he'd be lying if he said it was some kind of daring guile that had led him to use it on the Apes.

Purely circumstantial. A happy accident. The Fallen didn't mind.

Besides, he had more up-front matters to worry about.

**_Clank~! _**–he broke the blade off in an Ape's ribs, casting the hilt away like a piece of trash.

"_Damn it._"

An explosion lit up the swirling dust clouds surrounding him on his flank, Apes were hurled everywhere, and Palmet's maniacal laughter echoed out from a nearby tent.

At least arming his new helper with bombs was drawing a lot of the Apes off of him, just enough for him to cleave his way to the next pillar.

But this was a heavyweight fight.

They just kept coming, no matter how many he killed. He sliced, stabbed, lost weapons, got new ones, slashed, kicked, punched, _got _punched back, and hacked. His ribs hurt from when an officer had shield-bashed him across the breast, and he couldn't feel his left hand over the weapon he held there.

There were only a few regen-injections left on his suit's hem. He needed to use them sparingly. The pain was tolerable. He had to press on.

There was so much at stake if he failed…

The fate of a world, Ignitia, Harad and his Wing, Corrinthol's ugly face…

-That prime derg-puss that he'd lost himself in railing earlier today.

The Fallen laughed as he cut open an Ape's face and sent the body crashing through a tent. An officer hurried over and used his shield like a club, backhanding the Fallen off his feet like a ragdoll.

Something snapped in his torso, but he kept on laughing, rolling through the dirt, jamming a blade through the officer's foot and pinning him.

How many worlds had he done this on now? Waging war for a woman? It was a repeat pattern that never failed to amaze him.

Hadn't he crashed here looking for the fastest way out?

_Not anymore._

The Fallen gripped his blade with one hand on the tip and effectively sawed through the officer's neck, like it was a tree trunk. He ignored the flailing limbs and hoarse screams, gritting his teeth as hot blood spurted in reams from the ragged welt he drew until the metal started to rattle against the Ape's vertebrae.

The officer gurgled before his head popped off like a bottle cap and rolled away. The Fallen slapped his twitching paws away and shouldered the corpse to the earth, advancing without a word, but indeed with a slight limp.

This tower was _huge._ If only…

He glanced up and saw Torrdonal flapping along above all this mess. Ape crossbowmen were shooting at him through the dust to little success. It was because he was so jittery, the Fallen could hear him shrieking in panic every time a bolt whipped past his face.

Too bad the only amicable guy in the Wing was a complete frump. The Fallen might've offered him a job otherwise.

_Focus._

Corrinthol was comfortable to let the human clear a path for him. He stayed in the absolute rear, advancing only when the Fallen did, and far behind him. If the Fallen wasn't so preoccupied with more important matters, he might've cared about the limping, crying flame dragon flopping around in the dirt after him like a panicked caterpillar.

_I wonder where Palmet went._

**_Banngg~! _**–a hut imploded, sending wreckage everywhere. Palmet came running around a corner of stockades waving a lit stick of dynamite over his head like it was a bouquet he'd caught at a wedding. Meep was standing in his back fur, swinging his tentacles in a sort of mocking arc.

So much for a fearsome sewer beast.

The air crackled, and a barrier of fire erupted in the Fallen's path, trapping him between a cluster of tents and a sloping hut structure to his flank.

Standing in the dusty slum street, the human caught his breath and adjusted his explosives sack over his back, squinting when a huge Ape Commander lumbered on the other side of the flickering flames.

_Magic,_ the human thought, eyeing the flaming claymore jutting from the Ape's burly paw. He was wielding the normally two-handed blade like a knife.

"You've got gutz ta come inta _our_ toweh, _hoo-man!_" The Commander barked over the fire's roar. "Apes will crush you! Then crush your bones! Then crush dust! _You be nothing!_"

"Twirl, you cunt." The Fallen flipped him the finger.

The Ape hacked the air with his claymore and rattled out a battle cry. The magical flame barrier parted briefly, and a Dreadwing glided through the haze and landed with a crash in the center of the pathway. It shrieked. The Fallen groaned.

What were a few more bruises in the name of progress?

The Dreadwing's scream was abruptly cut off by the bundle of dynamite jammed in its mouth going off. Blood misted everywhere, and the headless corpse thundered onto its back, crushing its howling rider alive with a minute snap of bones.

The flames spawning from the dirt lowered, and a bellowing Ape Commander came rampaging out. He took longer to kill, but was ended nonetheless.

The Fallen twisted, and tore the machete horizontally, ripping open his furry abdomen. A tumbling landslide of intestines spilled onto the ground, and the Commander fell to a kneel, his jaw quivering as he reached down and rubbed his own stomach lining.

"…I-I…" He stammered. The Fallen slit his throat impatiently and ran around the corpse.

_There it is._

The second pillar was close now. He scanned the airspace inside the atrium and was surprised to see a lack of subsequent Dreadwing reinforcements.

He turned and looked back at the path he'd carved through the entrenchments and campsites. Quite a number of the beasts lye dead among all the smaller cadavers gridding the earth like sprinkles.

He hadn't killed _that_ many, surely?

In the backdrop, his confidence suddenly became overridden. The front gates of Forlorn swung ajar, and on a current of shrieking wind, rode a black, lithe creature into the atrium floor.

It was Cynder.

And she looked pissed.

_Huh,_ the Fallen slide down a stockade stairwell and slashed an Ape running up the steps to meet him. _She's even hotter when she's angry._

Cynder's white eyes spiraled around the chaos invading her headquarters. She reared back and shrieked like a hawk, her predatory cry echoing around the whole atrium.

_Definitely hotter._

"_Burn my charge, and suffer death, Purple Dragoness!_" Cynder howled, her wings flapping as she swooped over the destruction and glided towards the center stairwell. "_I come for you~!_"

"_Actually,_" The Fallen called out, ducking and beheading an Ape with a quick slash. "-_I'm the one who made the mess. And F.Y.I: I am _anything_ but sorry._"

Cynder had keen hearing, even for a dragon. Brakes practically screeched as she formed her membranes and flapped to a hover just before the stairs. Her elegant snout darted in his direction, across the whole distance, and Cynder sneered over her fangs.

"_Fallen!_" She roared, zipping over with gusto. "_I should've expected such meddling born from _your_ mind!_"

"You can't stickle me for my creativity." He leaped onto a palisade plat overlooking a nearby swathe of campsites. The ramshackle scrap structure moaned underneath him as Cynder slammed into the opposite side and preened in a combat pose before him, her body splayed, all her blades readied for action.

"_Fallen._" She rumbled, her brooch jittering around as her crimson breast heaved from the exertion of flight. "We finally meet again, face to face, and _alone,_ no further interruptions."

"My only regret is that it's over a rushed schedule." His eyes darted between her, and the fat, stone base of the very vulnerable second support pillar. It was just a few feet away, its foundation settled in a depressive dirt-pit that the Apes had stored barrels in disorganized piles around. "How fairs the lady this afternoon? Sorry about the tower."

"I _hate_ this tower. You rid me of a blemish in your quest." Cynder spat, trotting cautiously to begin circling him, her white eyes drinking in his bloodied, bruised and lacerated form. "How is it that you are able to almost effortlessly cut through my men with such abandon? Your skills in melee combat are… _formidable._"

"Is that an admirative compliment I hear?" The Fallen chuckled, his gore-slicked, stolen blade spinning in his fingers. "What I don't hear is an answer to my prior offer. What say you, black dragoness? Care to give the hominid meat-train a spin with those hips of yours?"

Cynder made a snorting sound and puffed steam out her snout.

"You have possessed me with some form of bewitchment." She hunched lower, her tail curling behind her in mesmerizing loops. "When I am finished transforming you into a vegetable, I am going to force out every morsel about how to undo it from your flesh. _After_, I perform personal experiments…"

She licked her chops.

"No male of any species has ever sparked my interest and lived."

"Listen," The Fallen grinned. "your banner's red, blue, white, black, whatever, you don't have to beg, _female._"

Cynder crooned at the challenge and swayed her hips, crimson energy brewing inside her maw.

"You're _mine._" Her voice undulated, like there were six of her talking at once, no doubt an effect from the pure Fear element flowing through her teeth.

"Okay." The Fallen blinked, a bulge forming in his suit's crotch. "Behold, she-drake! I wield the blade that is the breaker of draconic vaginas across the Multiverse! Challenge me, and accept that your hoard shall be plundered with impunity! ….In laymen's terms: you can run, you can hide, but my fleshly warhead will seek you out, and then-"

The Fallen itched his groin idly.

"….well, then I get to motor-boat your delicious buns." He raised his blade over his head. "_For the wyrm's-bountiful-snatch~!_"

Cynder shrieked and leaped at him.

The Battle for Forlorn had truly begun.

* * *

{🐉}


	20. Chapter 19 - The Battle of Forlorn

**Dragon(s)layer**

**19**

* * *

**The Battle of Forlorn**

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon Soundtrack: Small Valley Action}_**

* * *

To give Torrdonal credit for just a second: he did actually try. He really did.

But Cynder was far beyond his abilities. One was an average Warfangian warrior a head shorter than her mutated form, the other was a jet black magically altered superweapon who had been fighting for the Dark Army for years.

The jets of water shooting past Torrdonal's teeth topped the strength of a firehose, being capable of snapping wood. To Cynder, Torr' might as well have ran at her with a squirt gun.

She twirled in mid-air like a graceful, dark angel through the beams of white, her beautiful body glistening wet. Her claw slashed out, and Torrdonal flipped away end over end before crashing through the top of a tent.

Corrinthol was nowhere to be found, of course. So that only left her original target.

The Fallen rolled through a hut's window right as a crimson wave of Fear eviscerated the entire flank of the scrap building. Aluminum shrieked, boards crashed and dust and garbage flew everywhere. The Fallen shivered uncontrollably as he paused to take cover behind a warchest in the aft corner of the room.

He could hear whispers in his mind, and his body was gripped by an unshakeable sense of dread. It was the Siren's Scream that he heard Harad's Wing describing, one of the anti-elements only Night Dragons, and Cynder could use.

The urge to void his bladder was so strong that he almost gave into it, only stifling his own terror with a defiant cry, and a fist gripping his own hair.

_Focus! Or your allies die!_

The Fallen made a grunting sort of sound and rolled away from the warchest, tucking the dynamite sack to his back.

Cynder torpedoed through the sad remains of the Ape dwelling a moment later, a monstrous cry leaving her snout as her claw flattened all the refuse and furniture around the spot he'd been hiding in.

The Fallen didn't stick around to watch her regain her footing. Before Cynder could blink, he had scooped up a sheet of aluminum from the wreckage and swung it in a two-handed loop. The sharp edge caught her cheek with a tinny **_clank~! _**–noise rebounding around the smoking ruins. Cynder reeled, twisting through the wreckage like a black snake. Her hooked tail blade slashed purely in a reactive strike. The Fallen only survived when it smashed just short of his gut into an exposed rib of a tortured support beam.

The metal indented into a rough 'V' shape, and the Fallen hopped away. Cynder was snarling in fury as she wrenched her tail free and scrambled after him.

She was fast.

Faster than Spyra.

The Fallen had a difficult task ahead of him in the following seconds. He was sizing her up for something, or anything really now that he had her all to himself since first crashing here. He ducked under her tail and barely avoided a downwards path from one of her talons.

Cynder was doing this on purpose. She should've caught him with that last swipe…

So why was she holding back?

The Fallen could feel the pain in his ribs. One of them was probably at the least cracked, maybe even broken. The blows he'd been receiving were beginning to take their toll, and no amount of training and exercise was going to keep him alive if he was internally bleeding.

The magical runes scripting Cynder's face were pulsating like elegant lanterns. They were glowing a faint, ghostly blue through all the destruction-dust and the interior haze of the tower.

Striking her out of necessity was anathema to the Fallen, who suddenly found himself experiencing a clumsy museum-goers guilt. The feeling one got upon stumbling and putting their fist through an ornate oil painting by accident.

His foot caught Cynder in the breast and knocked the wind out of her. Even covered in perspiration and grime, her breath smelled like crushed mint. It blasted over his face as she sailed away and landed in the heart of duct chute connecting a maze of nearby weapon forges. The metal chute sang shrilly as she indented it down the center and kicked up sparks like a cloud of rain.

Cynder stewed for a second in the dust and toil. A reptilian groan echoed from her throat, and her tail slapped to drape limply across the ground. The Fallen licked his very dry lips and tore his gaze from his attacker.

_The pillar._

It was close. Just another aisle. He shouldered his dynamite sack and pressed forth, flinching when another section of the ceiling came down and crushed a mob of encroaching Apes and a pair of Dreadwings coming at him from the west.

The whole cadre screamed and barked shrilly, cut off to deathly silence the second the masonry hunk kissed the dirt.

That was sign that the plan was _half-working._

Forlorn was still holding. The tower was stubborn, just like its designers. It wasn't going to lay down after all these centuries and die so easily.

He needed to detonate the other pillars. Nothing could survive without its skeleton.

Practiced dashes of his stolen sword cast aside a pair of Apes attempting to engage him. Around a large storage tent filled to the brim with tethered bundles of glowing green Mana Crystals affixed to palettes, an iron spike the size of his leg whipped in a near-miss past his shoulder.

The Fallen stumbled and fell on his ass, blinking at the sight of a Spika-Cannon installed on the balcony of a large scrap-barracks overlooking the pathway.

The operator howled in challenge and slammed down on the firing pedal again, a ream of deathly spikes whipping out of the barrel with a fluent pattern of hisses.

The Fallen rolled and left a trail of stakes jutting from the earth in his path, the operator's aim true, but not _that_ true. Just a fingernail's width behind him. That minute error saved his life.

Vaulting on his knees, struggling with the weight of the sack, the Fallen struck a fuse and tossed a stick in a wide arc. The operator screamed as he caught it in his lap and began to fumble for it.

The Spika-Cannon and a whole chunk of the crudely styled Ape building it was bolted into vanished in a black, fiery cloud of destruction. The pintle ring fell through the incinerated aluminum roof and landed on something flammable inside the barracks. The resulting secondary cookoff cast flames through every single porthole, murder slot and window, the barracks building bulging like a cartoon character's stomach would after drinking too much water.

The sound of a tent flattening behind him told him that Cynder had never been far behind anyway. In a mad sprint, he chanced a glance and saw her bounding on all fours like a cheetah cat down the pathway at him, her snout pointing at him like an arrowhead.

_Shit._

He wasn't dodging this.

_Shit._

Cynder's chest was the next thing he felt. The dynamite sack flew away and landed in a heap on the ground. Her paws roughly dug into the earth on either side of him, and the Fallen cringed as his face smacked into the trodden dirt.

"_Even now, you course your foul energies through me!_" Cynder ranted, her tongue slavering out as she screamed over the din of destruction just beside them. Every part of her body in contact with him felt that exhilaration, that _breakthrough_ that she had felt upon first encountering him. "_Tell me what it is! Tell me how you've made it so extravagant!_"

Cynder wormed her thick hips and rolled the human over, her claw pinning him by the chest, like a black flower over his suited torso. The dragoness touched her snout to his nose and snarled, her white eyes wild.

"_Tell me how you can give me _more _of it._"

The Fallen closed his mouth and coughed, eyes darting around nervously.

"…I have some ideas…" He awkwardly peeped.

"Good show there, sir!"

The Fallen's head whipped over to a nearby forge chute, crossing two stories overhead like some kind of skyline. There was a man sitting on the edge of it, kicking his boots like it was a fine Sunday afternoon!

"_Conscience!_" He squawked.

"Looks like our plan worked out after all!" Conscience dusted his hands off and leaned back in his seat, gazing down at the pinned Fallen triumphantly. "With a few minor adjustments, and such and so forth."

"This really isn't the time…" The Fallen winced when Cynder's paw flexed. The dragoness blinked at him, still heaving, and turned to follow his gaze.

Of course, Cynder saw nothing.

A sweet tendril of laughter bubbled up in her chest, and she sat on his waist with a delighted sigh, turning her eyes to dote on the smaller hominid trapped between her rear paws.

"_Oh,_ I understand." She purred, licking her chops again. "You're going insane. Just like me…."

"It's-" He almost said it as usual. With a frustrated grunt, he grabbed her wrist and kicked his head back, shouting: "_-It's complicated~!_"

"You don't have to tell me. I've seen the furthest extent a broken mind can wander to. It is such a bountiful road… so commonly traveled, and so severely misunderstood… It's a flavor of life from the other side, the side people fear." Cynder gleefully let her paws slide through the dirt on either side of his head as she lowered herself, her rotund, crimson chest rubbing against his. She was… really, _really_ warm, and soft… "Do you fear _me,_ I wonder?"

The Fallen's panicked expression dropped off his face like a rock when he smelt it, the perfumey tint of female dragon. Cynder already smelled like a mint leaf, and the damned pheromones weren't helping.

_I can't be thinking of this now,_ he thought, unmoving as Cynder touched the tip of her snout to his nose again. He gulped as her fresh breath blew over his lips in tantalizingly smooth waves. He was literally encased in a cocoon of plush, scaly, dragoness muscle and fat.

Little Fallen was having none of his sass. His spear was a beast that shot to such rigid attention, that it earned a gasp of surprise from the evil warlord currently pinning him.

"…_Oh?_" She whispered, more explosions echoing in the background as forges ignited and dynamite reserves were caught by falling debris. Cynder cocked her head and spread her thighs, idly rolling her heavy hips over him. "_What is this that I have found, under your attire? It feels… it feels like a blade you have hidden from me._"

Cynder's expression of shock was short-lived, and a honeyed laugh murmured under her tongue as she ground over the trapped human beneath her.

_Must resist._

The Fallen's face was turning all kinds of colors as he forced himself to hold his breath and shut his eyes.

_Need to- to – dynamite –pillar –collapse –tower- ohhhhhhhgawd, she feels like a beany-bag of scaly girl-ness…_

The Fallen murmured nonsense as he leaned towards Cynder's crimson chest. The little brooch clinked quietly just beneath her choker. He aimed for the tender plane making the center of her breast and bit into it, trying to inhale as much of Cynder's spicy, fresh aroma as was possible.

For the dragoness' part, any remnants of her warrior spirit bled away in the coming second. Cynder buckled into the ground around her prey, and she moaned, like she would when she was pleasuring herself during all those lonely nights, in Forlorn and beyond in all her other posts she'd held.

Her meaty, feral hips rippled as she forced herself into his lap, trying to wedge the human's narrow lower half into the sweet, and plush crimson valley hidden under her supple tail and heavenly thighs.

Cynder let her neck crane as she gazed at the ceiling and sang for him a second, more raunchy note than the last. His arms slipped behind her black shoulders, interlocking his fingers just behind the spine at the base of her neck. Cynder's blood-red wings began to tremble, their joints eager to fully extend and become one with the air at the prospect of a mating ritual.

For all her might and power, romantically, Cynder was a cold and unused blade. When heat finally began its first tentative touches at the edges of her aura, her body began to hyperactively seek it in fullness desperately.

A moment ago, she had been chasing this human for the thrill of the hunt.

_Now_, she had caught him, and she would claim her prize as the successful huntress.

If any of her Apes tried to interfere, she would kill them. She would kill anyone who attempted to steal this moment from her.

This insane, out of character, flamboyant moment that she was having with a sworn enemy of her own cause.

Malefora's influence had never felt so distant.

What in the Ancestors' bowels had this wonderful creature done to her that could outdo an enchantment that had lasted her whole life?

Cynder felt alive.

She could breathe.

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night Soundtrack: Dreams}_**

* * *

"….This is not cast magic…" Cynder murmured, rolling as much of their flesh together as she could. She looked at him as he suckled on her crimson, softer plates like an eager hatchling seeking milk. It caused a chemical in her form normally reserved for matrons experiencing compassion for their young. Her heart threatened to burst. "…You _enchant_ females of my race."

It wasn't a question.

The Fallen slicked off her chest and gripped her just over her delectably breedable thighs. He wanted nothing more in that moment to impale Cynder and rut her, like she was a desperate, drooling hen. He wanted to bury himself in her and piledrive her until she became a blubbering pile of spit and secretions on the floor.

He wanted to fuck this black dragoness and fill her belly with his baby-batter, ten helpings of it in fact! Enough for a whole fucking brood.

"Wherever you come from must be a bold and terrifying place." Cynder whispered, all hatred, all anger having left her face. "…Who really _are_ you?"

He growled and dry-humped into the space just below her belly paunch. There was a muffled clap of scales. Cynder's mouth opened but no noise came out, her wings twitched, and extended a little wider behind her.

What followed was a pause, a feeling settling in from the weight of what he'd done. The Fallen- panting –glanced down at their merger and saw the raging erection straining to tear through his jumpsuit.

He had to be careful with that. His blade had done it in the past.

-But right now, his mind was more cloudy than the atrium level of this tower. He grunted and humped her a second time.

**_Clp~!_**

"_…ah…"_

Cynder sounded different there. Younger, more vibrant…

_Hmmmmm…._

Steadying her hips, he jammed into her a third time.

**_Clp~!_**

"-_Ah!..._" Cynder began to shiver uncontrollably, drool leaking briefly past her lower chop before her tongue slipped out and sliced it away. The runes decorating her snout were changing color.

They glowing almost like a muted shade of _pink._

_That's fascinating._

**_Clp~!_**

"-_Ah~!..._"

This was a reaction game. The pen pressure on a drawing tablet. It was time to see: how _hard_ could he press before he could get her to completely lose control?

He wished the jumpsuit would just be vaporized by the unbearable heat their hips were creating. Alas, it was not to be so. Still, the Fallen humped Cynder from below in a surprise offensive that soon saw her whimpering.

With each hit of his crotch into her valley, the clapping flesh became louder, and the '_Ah!'-_s from Cynder became more high pitched.

By the end of the fifteenth thrust, Cynder was reduced to wailing. Sex-starved for so long, and driven mad by the pent-up and unnatural energies the Portaljumper had coursing through his body, Cynder was inconsolable. An act that would've normally elicited little reaction from someone aside from some dirty foreplay was making her orgasmic.

Cynder deflated on top of him like a cat that couldn't get close enough to an owner with magic fingers. She merged her forehead to his skin-covered, smaller one and slammed her hips down to meet his thrusts. The fabric of the jumpsuit strained and began to develop a noticeable dampness as the Fallen's Jimmy drooled like a starving animal all over the interior pouch.

Cynder's moans weren't the same as Spyra's. Spyra was brash, and direct, straight to the point.

Cynder's voice was sweeter, and it was deeper, and it _sang._ She sounded like some kind of perfected bathhouse matron only heard of in prepubescent male fantasy. Cynder's black hips rippled, and her bladed tail swept in looping arcs behind her as he viciously pistoned into her. He could feel her opening, through the suit. It was like the Nile down there. Their bodily slaps started to become wet as she bled liquid love all over his waist and belly, droplets flicking out from the connective slams that quivered her lower half and earned efforted grunts from his throat.

The Terror of the Skies was beside herself, panting, her tongue wagging around like a dog's. The Fallen unlinked his hands and brought them down as hard as he could past her legs.

**_Smack~!_**

-Cynder's ass cheeks were a pair of the world's softest exercise balls, and they wiggled with miniature formations of scaly tsunamis around his fingers as he slapped them.

Her wings jolted, but didn't preen.

He _always _got them to preen. Even the tough ones like her.

Maybe it was time to take a page out of Spyra's playbook…

"…_I'm going to take you alive,_" He snarled through his teeth. "_just so I can do what I please to you._"

Cynder's moaning lowered for a moment, as she continued to jolt with each of his thrusts, she let a little laugh slip through her chops.

"…D-Don't think this changes anything, _human…_" The anger in her voice was a façade. A convincing one. But still a façade. "…You've damaged my tower, destroyed my Mana Crystal cavern, and wiped out a quarter of my army… Your days were numbered the moment you came from the sky. My Master will crush you."

She grabbed a wad of his hair and wrenched his head back, grinning evilly at him.

"It is your broken remains I seek to claim for my pleasure, not the man they once were."

"Funny." It was a bit of mood killer. The whole psychotic villainess and vegetable-making thing. But he could work around it. "Broken remains can't remind you of everything you don't have. _Love_ being the primary one…"

Cynder's thrusts became less forceful, but her grin was still there.

"Your manipulation skill is weak." She criticized. "Just like the Purple Dragoness'. D-Did she rub that off on you? Hmmm? When you were sizing her up all this time? To enchant her, and turn _her_ into your mate? _Her?_"

The Fallen mentally chuckled.

These dragons.

Always so overzealous, prone to emotion and arrogant. Males were worse in their own way, usually bluntly, and up-front.

_Females_ on the other hand…

They required work. Work to understand them, to analyze them, to decompile their stories and let them know that one sought the sweet nectar they reserved for so few in their long lives…

"I already did." He smirked.

Cynder looked horrified. She stopped humping.

"…_w-what…?_"

The dream. She sounded like she did in the dream. A lost hatchling fresh from the egg, and crying on the floor. A harmless strip of soft meat entirely reliant upon others older.

"I already did, I already fucked the daylights out of your world's _Prophesized Savior._ I literally dicked your bible. And she _loved_ it, just earlier today in fact. But can I let you in on a secret?" The human scooted upwards and stopped thrusting, his muscles burning as the pain from his battle fatigue began to creep back up on him. "While I was fertilizing Spyra's womb, I was thinking about how it would feel to find the unloved, outcast black dragoness that was enslaved to the darkest of powers."

Cynder's wings twitched. He could see some membrane.

"A female whose very life had been stolen from her, where so much had been taken from her, and so little given back to fill that empty, hungry void in her guts. Someone who was terribly lost in the dark, brooding, and skulking, fighting a war for a cause her true, inner self didn't believe in…"

Cynder's face changed before his eyes. Not in the ways of her expression.

Her face _shifted._

It took him aback. He had to force through the pause to keep talking, to keep the charade going.

But man, did he have questions now. Or maybe he had answers. Probably fifty-fifty. These mutations? These changes?

It was a shell. It was a shell, and now he knew it was a shell.

"…I thought about how lonely such a soul would be, eternally gripping at the dark for some semblance of control that could never be hers. As she watched herself destroy her own body, her mind, and a world she desperately wanted to be included in…"

Cynder's prior expression of bliss had been replaced by something else. As her mouth hung open, he could only read one thing:

_Pain._

Cynder was in a kind of state that could not even be replicated by tears. It was a kind of hopelessness that outclassed them.

Her wings drooped.

"…_But then,_" He casually slipped a hand up to cup her prehensile snout's chin, feeling her warm scales on his palm. "I thought about what would happen to her if a light pierced the shadows, and suddenly, a hand reached out, and gave her a taste of the one thing she always lacked, and threatened to take her with it, beyond the veil, to the great, brilliant void that she had never understood. I thought about what would happen if her shackles vanished, and a crusader arrived to shower her in attention, in gold, in food, and in consul. What would happen if I put her in the place of a happy wingmaiden… and…"

Cynder leaned closer, her minty breath washing over his face again. Her wings twitched and started to spread very slowly behind her long, regal neck. The Fallen's lips brushed the tip of her snout, and Cynder's minute gasp was of the volume of a pin dropping. It was all he could hear.

"…_and_ as repayment for that, she let me subdue her upon the floor, grip her beautiful haunches, and peel aside her powerful tail..." The Fallen grinned, and humped into her one last time.

**_Clp~!_**

Cynder went catatonic, mouth flapping like a fish's.

"…and I planted a steaming load of my prodigy in her supple belly, and made her the matron she'd always wanted to be."

The Fallen locked his lips over the tip of her snout.

**_Fwooofff~!_**

Ah. There it was.

-Cynder had by the far the widest preen he'd ever gotten from a dragoness. Massive, ruby wings with black fingers took up everything on the left and right, blossoming like felt flowers.

"…Sounds dreamy, don't it? But I mean," The Fallen quietly disconnected from her, shrugging in amusement. There was an explosion nearby. Another smokestack was coming down as the roof of Forlorn literally shook itself apart. "…it was just a thought."

"_Yes._" Cynder cried, gripping him by the head and yanking up to her face. "_She says YES!_"

"I'm sorry." The Fallen shrugged, wiggling free of her forepaws. Cynder gazed at him in shock as he stood in front of her, dusted himself off, and grinned. "But that isn't in the cards just at this moment."

"…_w-w-what?_" Cynder squeaked.

He pushed his palms into her chest, making her shudder.

"This might get a little rough." He winked.

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon Soundtrack: Small Valley Action}_**

* * *

Cynder opened her mouth to speak, but then, the Fallen heaved and rolled her onto her back with a single, forceful push.

Cynder flipped onto her hinds, lost her balance, and roared as she slammed onto her back, spreading her wings to save them from her own weight.

She rolled onto her feet and snarled. A piece of the roof slammed into the space between her and the human with a thunderous crash, blinding her for a second with dust.

Coughing, the black dragon vaulted the stone and grit her teeth as she pierced its veil with her stone eyes.

The Fallen leapt down the incline, the dynamite sack in his arms, a fuse lit on a stick jutting out from his fist. Cynder screamed as loud as she could and sprinted in pursuit.

_He tricked me._

Cynder didn't know whether to let her rage flow, or give in to tears.

_He tricked me._

There was no time for anything else. The Fallen navigated the rows of pallets surrounding the giant buttress base, and he tossed the entire bag at it, underhanding the lit stick, and saluting as he backed away.

"I send you to hell in lights." He muttered, and ran for his life.

**_Bannnngggg~!_**

-The explosion knocked him off his feet. He rode the concussive wave for almost twenty feet through the air, flames chasing just behind him the whole way, and landed roughly on a scrap-shack.

He punched a hole through the sheet metal roof and landed in a pile of debris inside, snapping a ratty table and sending clay jugs scattering in millions of pieces.

The explosion plumed at the neck and climbed for the atrium's ceiling. The burst was so powerful that it blew away a quarter of the western wall, and created a tumbling wreckage-slide down the plateau levels ringing Forlorn's foundation in. Hundreds of Apes died as the ceiling began to give way and debris rained with the viscosity of hail on the campsites and barracks below.

Cynder had taken flight, and had seen the orange bloom of the explosion coming right for her face. Magic was her savior, as she wreathed herself in a shielding spell that saw her unmolested by the fire, even as it angrily grabbed her and shook her through the air.

The black dragoness flipped and created a skid, smashing through a series of tents and ending her painful travel into the foot of a sentry stockade tower.

The tower's legs snapped against her wings and shoulders and it toppled forwards, its penthouse landing in the center of a storage warehouse filled with freshly primed dynamite. The explosion wiped out the rallying yard just ahead of the front gates, undoing months of construction progress in the blink of an eye.

The patrol gantries lining the walls were tumbling like tinsel, their doomed archers and crossbowmen staff being crushed, falling to their deaths or burning alive. Ape officers had no idea what to do. To them, it was as if the world itself was ending around them. The first two explosions were now devolving into a heat rush that threatened to spell doom for everyone inside Forlorn. Flames rose to the height of towers from every angle of the camps and barracks sprawls, bathing the atrium floor in a hellish amber glaze.

Soon, the temperature would rise to such a catastrophic degree that creatures even in close proximity to Forlorn's outside grounds would be vaporized.

_Firestorm._

The Fallen had seen them before. Cynder and her army had never expected anyone to be foolish or crazy enough to start destroying things while they were still inside. There were kegs of TNT lying around like messy teenagers deposited underwear around their rooms.

So much stuff was cooking off that the ground atrium arena of Forlorn was becoming a pressure cooker.

And still, the third pylon was holding.

The dragons were arrogant as fuck, but you couldn't deny that they were pretty damn good architects.

Giant Anteaters ran past in a panic for the opened front gates. They snapped out of reins and abandoned carts. Several Apes were trampled by their own beasts of burden. The Fallen himself was nearly flattened as he stumbled out the doorway of the hut he'd landed in.

A furry mass slipped in front of his nose and rumbled for the gates nearby. He turned and watched the horse-sized anteater as it fled the flames.

_Not a bad idea._

The Fallen nervously clicked his teeth and nursed his bruises and ribs.

The last pylon was in walking distance.

An explosion rattled the area nearby. He watched a mushroom cloud crawl into the air above, catching a Dreadwing and his rider, both of whom entered the plume unscathed, and emerged on the other side, burning alive, and tumbling down to their dooms.

The Fallen sighed shakily and closed his eyes, feeling the unbearable heat wash over him from every direction.

He stood in hell. Another he'd created.

How wonderful a day to die.

* * *

{🐉}

Ignitia used her horns on the doors. They smashed open in a storm of black splinters, shredding the pair of Cold Legion Apes that had been posted just behind them to bloody ribbons.

Snarling, the Fire Guardian stood in the observatory lobby and scanned her surroundings.

A round chamber with a porch plat stood before her. Overgrown with creepers, but in relatively pristine condition. It smelt of mint leaves and old parchment, and was serene in its silence. Ignitia could imagine that the Cloud Ripper had spent many evenings up here winding down.

She sneered at the twitching pair of guards bleeding to death on the floor, and left them to drain as she trotted to the chamber's center.

A pair of massive, lead orbs caught her eye. One was larger than the other, and they both reflected the slight tint of daylight sneaking in from the observer's plat nearby. The pods. These were the things that the Fallen had claimed he came down in… and truthfully, they were just as out of place and alien as he was.

Ignitia wanted to examine them further, but couldn't. She swallowed and looked around rapidly. She found the archway leading into a study, and sprinted through.

Inside, Cynder's nesting was propped in a corner, and a little window overlooked the Frontier Sea and the faraway ruins of Stormwatch. End tables and shelves were stocked with all kinds of scrolls and books. Tens of them. Ignitia managed a brief smile and darted forwards to the nearest table.

Maps, maps, lots of maps, and notes. She didn't have time to be picky.

Marked locations? Of what? It didn't matter. She bundled it all in clawfulls and stuffed it in her little bag. Reams and reams of… what was all this, some kind of series of diary entries? Didn't matter. Into the sash they went.

**_Bmmmmmmm~_**

The observatory quivered and Ignitia stumbled to regain lost footing. She looked at the observer's plat and blinked when soot began to rise from below the balcony.

The Fallen must have blown up one of the pylons. She didn't have much more time.

Her hip bag ran out of room as she scrambled over to a shelf and stuffed in as many books as she could. When it bulged and weighed on her hip, she found a traveler's pouch sprawled beside Cynder's nesting. She used it like a cocoon and bundled tens of scrolls and parchment rolls without even bothering to read their contents.

She ransacked Cynder's quarters, ripping open a chest and sifting through little parchment wrapped Mana Crystal nuggets, the pre-cut ones dragons commonly used for refreshment. Cynder had enough of them to last her years out here. Ignitia accidentally touched one without its wrap and shuddered when the gem was absorbed into her body with a weak flash of light. She was old enough that Mana Crystals were no longer required for her elemental casting, but they still offered an energetic rush when taken.

She now felt rejuvenated.

She found Cynder's larder behind the nesting. Dried cheeses hung from racks, cured meats were in wraps on a table, but nothing here spoke of any further records.

This couldn't be all of them! She barely had enough to fill two shelves.

Cynder had to have the rest of them somewhere. The books, the scrolls, there was more! She remembered, from all those years ago.

A cabinet! There.

Ignitia used her teeth and ripped the doors off their hinges.

A tsunami of books tumbled out!

But so too did a panic-stricken, screaming green thing with red eyes.

The Guardian reeled as a Grublin clutched onto her breast and wouldn't let go, stabbing at her with a little knife clenched in its gnarly claw.

Gigaw was making all kinds of vicious shrieking noises as he slashed at Ignitia's tough, golden breastplates. One strike hit a notch, and embedded to the hilt. Ignitia roared as blood trickled past the steel.

She mounted her hinds and swatted the creature off her with a quick slash of her paw. Gigaw flattened an end table and skittered with pieces of the top across the lounge.

Ignitia ground her fangs as she fell back to all fours, glaring down at the knife sticking out of her chest. She gripped the hilt and yanked it free with a tiny gasp, blood spattering onto the floor between her fores.

She heard little claws scrabbling on the tiles. Ignitia cast her wing aside and spat a ream of pure flame after Gigaw, who was scrambling into the lobby chamber.

The Grublin shrieked as he threw himself through the doors to the chute stairwell, the flames just knicking the backs of his little legs. Ignitia cut her breath attack. She didn't have time for a lone Grublin, whatever its reason for being up here had been.

The books…

Ignoring her wound, the Guardian started to gather them all up in a somewhat organized pile. More booms and muffled thuds were evidence enough of the fight being surely underway. The Fallen had certainly made well on his promise. When he wanted to cause it, he was going to make one big fucking mess of a scene.

_Spyra. Please be okay, please be okay, please be-_

Ignitia paused as she finished organizing the pile.

…What was she _doing?_

The Purple Dragoness was back! She was alive, and had been safe. Ignitia hadn't felt such joy in years, maybe even in her whole life!

That egg… _all of those eggs…_ Ignitia had loved them like they were her own babies.

And one of them was still here!

And she'd…

She looked down at the books, blood still leaking down her golden breast.

…And she'd journeyed to get _these?_

Why hadn't she gone into the catacombs with Spyra? Why hadn't she followed to protect her?

Ignitia stifled a cry by eating her own fist, a tear rolling down her finned cheek. She was in shock. It hadn't set in. She was still living her life for the obsession she had developed over the books, and the knowledge, and the hunger for information, the noise to drown out her depression and her sorrows…

She was a failure.

**_Bmmmmmmm~!_**

-Another explosion rattled the whole observatory. The screech of metal caught her attention, and she glanced quickly into the lounge, her thoughts leaving her.

The metal pods were sliding to the left. The floor was angling, and so was she.

The sky beyond the observatory railing was _shifting._ The Forlorn's tower was starting to teeter in its moorings. She was out of time.

Throwing the books into the ajar remains of the cabinet, Ignitia tossed her sash in too and knocked the piece onto its back. She wrapped her forepaws under the rim, and sprinted for the platform on her hind legs, swinging her tail for balance, kicking open her brilliant, flaming wings.

Explosions thundered the backdrop as she cradled the cabinet and leaped over the railing, her wings beating once, twice, and carrying her over the panorama of the Funguswood below.

Light of breath, the Guardian winced as the weight of the books strained her forepaws. She glanced over her membrane and watched in horrid fascination as the Forlorn Watch began to swivel, like a buoy in the surf bobbing on waves.

The tower was collapsing.

_Spyra… my hatchling!_

* * *

{🐉}

The Moles had to be herded, a little bit like sheep. Morinth and Taliopia had one side, Harad the other, Spyra was the one in front, killing any Apes that ran or jumped into their path.

"Keep going!" She cried, her talons flecking blood as she tore through a trio of Ape soldiers who screamed and died. "_Run! All of you!_"

Explosions were constant, and fire began to consume the atrium. Entire camps were aflame, and forges were detonating. The Apes she was killing weren't even intentionally trying to get in their way to stop the slaves.

They were all running. Where to? Wherever. Anywhere in their desperate bids to get away from the fire that was killing them.

Still, some of the Apes weren't too keen on not having anyone to take with them. Perhaps in last-ditch efforts of stubborn hatred, a small band of warriors suddenly descended on the Moles from a diverging pathway.

Moles screamed as the Apes mercilessly fell upon them and hacked them to death with imprecise swings. They killed indiscriminately. Women and children were sliced to pieces and trampled.

Harad jumped into the fray first and slammed an Ape so hard with his mace-tail that he snapped the simian in two. Spyra followed his example and vaulted into the nearest Ape with a warcry, flames leaping from her throat and burning them to ashes.

"_Spyra!_" It was Morinth, she was cutting an Ape out of her way with her tailblade, pointing her wing wildly to something ahead. "_Watch out!_"

Spyra felt cold, driving pain as something hit her in the chest and sent her rolling through the dirt. She scrambled to her heels, wincing at the damage wrought to her breast, and watched as a Dreadwing screamed at her, highlighted orange by all the deathly fires invading the area.

"_You!_" A massive Ape slid down the beast's wing and strode between it and her, pointing a vicious-looking, barbed axe, one of two, in Spyra's direction. "Purple Dragon!"

Chieftain Visigoth ignored the Moles, and the other dragons, snarling as he trotted closer and smashed the flats of his axes together, kicking sparks.

"Our battle has not concluded." His deep voice droned over the flames penning them in. "I will fashion a fresh banner pole from your spine, she-drake!"

"-_Visigoth!_" A second Dreadwing covered in plate armor and a snarling helm flapped in a hovering stance overhead, a similarly large Ape swinging his arm at the warlord in the saddle. "The toweh's comin right down! We gotz ta go! Leave her ta burn!"

"_Fly,_ Jute, lead your tribe to salvation!" Visigoth spat into the dirt and trudged towards Spyra. "We die together if needed. I will have my honor back."

"…Buddy," Spyra snorted, hunching lower and flicking her tail. "if I fried you once, I'll fry you _again._ Anybody up for some singed Ape-steaks? I'm buyin'."

Visigoth howled and ran at her, swinging his axes with abandon.

* * *

{🐉}

Nobody even attempted to stop him. There was no one left.

Nothing but charred and broken corpses. Nothing but the whisper and roar of fire.

The Fallen hummed to himself as he trekked the macabre fields he had reaped through the Ape campsites. Bodies and bodies, wrecked stockades, abandoned turrets and barracks. A hellish ghost town.

The squeak of wheels drew his attention, and the path ahead was obscured when something rammed through the folded remnants of the tower.

It looked like a carriage at first, but steam was screaming out the back of it, and metal plates were bolted over the wooden frame as a makeshift armor component. A snarling grille vent bled red light from a coal-fed tank, and bladed wheels tore into the earth with every rotation.

That must have been the WarrWagon Palmet had mentioned.

An open seat in the spine contained a trio of operators who all hooted and swung coal-shovels in the air with abandon. The world was on fire, and these fuckers were still high as kites on engine-adrenaline.

The WarrWagon hissed steam as the driver wrenched the poorly constructed wheel and directed the grilled nose right for the Fallen. It chugged, and rattled, and burped soot out hastily bolted pipes running along the sides.

The Fallen finished lighting a fuse and chucked the stick.

One answer for everything.

He'd had enough fighting today.

The dynamite landed inside the seating compartment. Then the WarrWagon blew apart in a wretched squeal of metal and cinder of wood. Parts flew everywhere, and every part of the main chassis that didn't wilted, and became a black scab where it folded to, like the peeling remains of a can nuked inside a microwave.

He limped around the steaming mecha-corpse and continued on his way, spitting at it for good measure.

A quick dip in a dynamite barrel had refreshed everything he needed. The bandolier over his chest would be enough and he knew it.

The last pylon, open in a clearing. The Apes hadn't constructed anything around or on it, apparently using the space as a mustering yard for infantry.

"-_Wooooo~! Hoooo~! Ah! Bugga-nuts! Boss! _Fank the ghosteez of yore I found ya…" Palmet came jogging out from nearby. His fur was frazzled, blackened, and daggered all over, making it look like he had been struck by lightning. He must've set a fuse too short. "…I ran outta dynamite, but ya should've seen all the chaos I reaped with what I had! Me and Meep showed dem loyalists whatfor, didntwe, Meep?"

The little octopus creature appeared on his shoulder, and pumped a tentacle into the air.

"**_Meep!_**" –It squeaked.

The Fallen slowly trailed his eyes between the two of them and sighed, looking at the pylon just ahead.

"Palmet," He tiredly jabbed a thumb at the front gates, just a yard away, where liberating daylight streamed through and bracketed the hellish amber glaze deeper inside here. "just get out of here. I don't care where you go."

"…Oh… But, ah… I thought-" The Fallen glared at him and he shut up, fiddling with his paws. "…_Right,_ back on the road again, I see how it is. Well, if ya don't mind so much, why not jus kill meh like ya did all the other Apes?"

"Call it a stroke of mercy." The Fallen shrugged, tossing the bandolier at the foot of the great pylon. It hit the earth with a muted _crunch! _–making Palmet wince. Meep in turn was watching, fascinated. "Nobody can seem to think of me in a straight way. I'm either a ruthless butcher or a crusading savior. When are people going to see that it doesn't work like that? That's there's a _gray _area, and that we're all in it?"

The Fallen toyed with a stick in his hands and shrugged.

"You better get out of here, the tower's coming down."

"Yeh, I can seez dat." Palmet snorted, looking up as the great dome buckled, and chunks continued to break away overhead. More TNT caches somewhere nearby detonated and thundered the whole atrium. The screams of dying Apes had all but gone silent by this point. The Ape hummed in thought, and brought Meep to cradle in his arm. He pet the unsanitary creature idly for a second. "…I'm a simpul mahn,"

"I had no idea." The Fallen creased a lip.

"but even I gotta say this: what else can we do every day besides wut feels right?"

The Fallen slowly looked over at him, and blinked.

"…Who are you again?"

"Oi, boss, I kno it's been a long battle, but I didn't fink my name was _that_ easy to forget…"

In the distance, a pained scream caught the Fallen's ear.

Tanged, undeniably feminine, loud as hell, it must be…

"Spyra!"

In the distance, surrounded by flaming debris, there she was, fighting for her life against an Ape triple her size.

"Oi, that's Visigoth! My old employer!" Palmet pointed proudly. "…I hope he doesn't have any hard feelins about the whole betrayel fing… Maybe I should send him flowas and a good will lettah befer I approach him."

"Take your mumbling self and get the fuck out of this tower." The Fallen shoved him towards the gates, and broke the fuse on the stick. Meep squealed and hid in Palmet's arm crease. "I kept the long fuse for a reason…"

* * *

{🐉}

"Is that everyone?" Morinth wheezed, circling the congregation of Moles as Taliopia led them to the edge of the Funguswood surrounding the road.

"Everyone we could manage." Harad nodded, glancing back at the tower. "The Wingleader still hasn't returned…"

"Neither has Spyra!" Torrdonal gasped, dragging Corrinthol with him. The red dragon was babbling incoherently and sucking on his thumb talon, mumbling words like: "_Cynder!_" –and- "_Maniac!_" –and- "_Aliens!_"

"Wait! Someone's coming through the gates!" A Mole pointed for the soot-leaking, great archway at the foot of the crumbling tower. A single, humanoid shape materialized and sprinted down the ramp.

"Is that the fucking monkey?" Harad gawked.

"Cheeky that, we've literally sleuthed our way through some of the most lethal situations in our lives and somehow he survived." Morinth sighed.

"_-I'M ALIVE!_" Palmet distantly called, sprinting closer and closer. "I'm alive an well! No one needs ta worry, I'm still here ta be yer emotional support, and yer personal, uninhibitedz, shoe-shiner-_"_

A piece of debris smashed right into where the Ape was standing with a ragged crash. Some of the Moles gasped. Dust clouded and pebbles clobbered down. Then there was silence.

Harad grunted, and Morinth chuckled.

"I should allude to unfulfilled desires more often." She bashfully looked over to where Taliopia was whipping out healing salves and applying them to a crying Mole infant in the crowd. "…_I _could_ have a girlfriend who's tough and sassy and confident, yet somehow…_" She muttered.

A long pause.

Nothing happened.

"Shit." The dragoness chirped cheerfully. "_Aaaand_ it's gone."

"The Purple Dragon is still inside." Harad grimly uttered. "With that _thing_ that the clouds shit on our heads."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Freezer Action}_**

* * *

Spyra flipped over the axe and landed, bands of lightning flickering from her mouth and impacting Visigoth dead-center his breast.

The power surged through him, and though he screamed in pain, he still pressed his advantage. She slipped over one slash, ducked under another and feinted a third.

Visigoth caught her on the fourth.

The axe slashed across her chest and drew blood in a near hit. Spyra cried out and tried to beat her wings to get distance. Visigoth reached out with a grimy fist and grabbed her tail, yanking her back to him with a snarl of: "-_Come back here!_"

Spyra rolled in the dirt and he pressed a heel over her head, compressing, and burying her snout into the ground. She flailed and tried to tear into him with her rear paws, but found they couldn't reach.

It was getting hard to breathe.

"What victory befalls me." Visigoth muttered. The killing of dragons, the art of his youth, lost upon him by the politics of his own world. He was heaving from such a short and albeit efficient duel. His limbs were tired, his breath limited. Spyra had undone most of what Tinker had fixed. Gouge wounds matted his torso, his lower half was scorched and patches of his fur and skin had become blasted fields of blisters and rubber.

Still, he stood defiant, even as his body was stripped away. It was always the plan, to claw and bite and kill until the very end.

He had always planned on doing the same to Cynder when he could've, realigning the Apes to once again be nomads of their own homeland. To have Apes fighting for _Apes_ and no one else. That was the spirit of their people. That was what was meant to be.

That was what hadn't happened.

But, in hindsight, perhaps betrayal needed a few more years to simmer before it would be appropriate. And, in the meantime, maybe slicing the Northerner's prophesized savior into cutlets would alleviate the travesty if only briefly.

One could be hopeful.

Visigoth swung down with both axes past the knee. The tip of a sword burst through his stomach and blinded him as his own gore spurted in his face.

Visigoth reeled in suffering silence, collapsing onto his back as Spyra wrenched her head from the dirt and gasped to refill her lungs.

"-_F-Fallen?!_" She sputtered.

"Get off my bitch, you walking ball of lint." The Fallen snarled, dropping his bloodied blade.

Visigoth vomited red, rolling over as he made for one of his axes. The Fallen ran forwards and tore it from his paws, throwing it away before kicking the warlord onto his back. Visigoth was saying something. A hoarse whisper under his breath.

"I'll give you that. Tell me." The Fallen straddled the Ape's larger waist and knelt down to hear what it was.

"…_too old for this shit._"

Visigoth started heaving deep, tortured laughter. Blood bubbled through his teeth, and his glowing eyes began to laze as he clenched at the impalement wound through his guts. His entrails were slithering out of the breach like eager leeches.

"Why didn't you just walk away?" The Fallen shook his head. "Honestly."

"…_not… a coward._" Visigoth suddenly reached up and gripped the Fallen by the scruff of his jumpsuit, yanking him closer. "…I am here until the end, _human._"

"You're there." The Fallen gripped him by the jaw. "And by the way?" He leaned closer. "_This is for Cynder._"

He twisted, and Visigoth went limp.

"You okay?" He took Spyra's paw and lifted her off the ground, dusting her wings dotingly. "He didn't hurt you _too_ bad did he?"

"Nothin' I ain't dealt with before." Spyra quietly laughed, looking up at him with a grin. "But I had it under control. Eating the dirt was… uhm… part of my strategy, to mislead him."

"Uh-huh." He rubbed a thumb on her cheek. "That's Spyra for you."

**_Bmmmmmm~! _**-The last stick.

-The tower moaned and rumbled around them. The ceiling, the _entire ceiling_ was crumbling now, and if he didn't know any better, the roar getting louder and louder from the stairwell meant that the chute was coming down.

This whole atrium was about to be a parking lot.

"Go! _Run!_" He cried, shoving her along for the daylight streaming through the gates not too far away.

Mounds of debris snapped from the heavens above and crashed with mighty blasts of dust and fire all around them. The tower strained, buckled and howled as ancient stonework failed and the legacy of the southern wyrms became undone all at once.

Spyra took flight and zipped through the archway just as he was about to step through.

A pained sound stopped the Fallen in his tracks.

Standing at the top of the road ramp, he spun around, wild-eyed, and looked back at the main rallying yard.

It was Cynder, she was crawling out from a pile of banister poles, and the hurricane of tumbling debris was almost on top of her. She locked eyes with him across the distance. The dragoness cut off any further vocalities and grimly sneered at him, staying still, her jaw quivering.

Maybe one of them was willing to let it be…

He growled at the sunlight outside, and turned around.

-but not _both_ of them.

* * *

{🐉}

"_Fallen~!_" Spyra screamed, tearing against Morinth and Taliopia's paws as they held her back. The air crackled and Forlorn began to get shorter, and shorter, the tower vanishing beneath a growing plume of dust and fire. "-_FALLEN!_"

The observatory plat was the last thing to go. It disappeared as the last of the tower's great chute became one with the crumbling remains of the atrium. A last report of thunder rolled across the land.

And then all was still, save for the tumbling of a few last, errant bricks.

The dust cloud didn't show signs of dissipating, but the explosions, the howls of Apes and the screams of Dreadwings had all died out.

A slight breeze rolled in, and a toad croaked. Tears started to flow down Spyra's snout. She heaved and stopped resisting against Morinth and Tali'.

"…_No…_" She sobbed. "_NO!_"

Torrdonal drunkenly fell on his belly beside Corrinthol, who had gone quiet, both of their eyes locked on the dust cloud and nothing else. Harad was unreadable, but anyone closely examining him could see his gaze darting everywhere, looking to pick out any semblance of life persevering in the dust.

The crowd of Moles were all still too. _Everyone_ was still after that mess. The only thing to breach the silence was Spyra's mourning sobs.

"…_Sssshh, ssshhh, it's okay dearie…. You're okay…_" Morinth soothed, rubbing circles between Spyra's wing joints.

"D-Does that mean the Fallen's… _is he…?_" Taliopia bit her talons.

"And what if he is?" Morinth's voice cracked, her suddenly remembering what it felt like when he touched her on the chin. She wanted that back, and didn't want to admit it.

"…I…" Taliopia turned her head away and bit her lower chop. She hugged Spyra's side and sighed in defeat. "_I'm sorry, Spyra._"

"At least we got the Purple Dragon!" A Mole suggested nearby. Morinth hissed and shot him a death-glare, making him jump and quiet down.

"His sacrifice wasn't in vain, at least." Harad sighed, settling on his launches. "Forlorn, an entire Ape tribe, and the _Terror of the Skies_ all wiped out in a single battle. This _Fallen_ might have turned out to have been a hero after all."

"I'll say, he's certainleh got a nobel sorta streak to him he does." Palmet sneezed as dust wafted in his face as he stood next to Morinth. The latter craned her snout over and blinked at him, before turned back to stare at the cloud where Forlorn had been.

"No, really, I should've seen that coming." She said.

"**_Meep!_**" Meep crawled up Palmet's arm, making him chuckle.

"Was a close call earlieh that was, eh, Meep?"

"Mmhm, the wrong party members died." Morinth grunted.

"Oh! Look, dere he is." Palmet pointed. "See dat? An all yu were havin a fit ovva nothing."

"Can you not grace us with but a moment of quiet?" Harad growled. "Just because I hated the scrawny sky-alien does not mean I will not afford him a warrior's silence."

"The Ape's right." A Mole shouted. "Down the ramp, see?"

Spyra gasped and shot up out of Morinth and Taliopia's paws, her red, puffy eyes lit up like lanterns.

Striding in an even jog was a large shadow getting ever closer by the second. The dust parted, and Spyra shrieked in joy, flapping her wings and darting over to meet the subject halfway.

"_FALLEN!_" She squealed. "_Oh, Fallen, I thought you were dead! I thought _I _was dead! And there were explosions, and dying monkeys, and shit and- and-_"

Spyra blinked and skidded to a halt half-way through her lunging hug.

Cynder tiredly blinked back at her.

So did the Fallen.

She was tossed over his shoulders, like an oversized rucksack.

"H-Hey, Spyra." He muttered, his knees wiggling. "Sorry, I had to take a-"

He collapsed, Cynder giving a pained squeak as she pinned the poor human under her scaly girth. An arm popped out from around her thigh and pointed in the air.

"-_I ahhd tuu akke a eetoorr._" –Muffled through Cynder's belly.

"I must have died." Spyra sniffled, glaring with increasing rage at the black dragoness. "Cause it'd be a cold, damn day in _hell_ I sit back and let you sprawl all over _MY HUMAN!_"

"_Yours?!_" Cynder reclined in shock, standing and yanking the Fallen to his feet, only to clutch him protectively to her large chest. "_Clearly_ the advances he has made upon me _repeatedly_ in the field of battle suggest that I am the more sought-after partner. Grace and majesty before _dirty commoners,_ Spyra. That's the way the world works."

"Yeah? Well then why'd he fuck me and not you?" Spyra shrieked, growling like a dog, her prior mourning completely forgotten. "_I'm the one cookin' his egg-spit right now, bitch, all you got is an empty, cold cunt! I bet you puff _dust_ when you queef!_"

"_Male-stealing slut!_" Cynder howled, and the two dragonesses slammed into one another and tumbled through the dirt, snarling, biting, kicking, cursing. The poor Fallen stood there and watched without a clue as to what to do.

"…Fallen?" Harad blinked nearby.

"-It's- _it's-_" The Fallen pointed at the tower, himself, then the dragonesses…. "-it's fuckin' complicated, alright?"

"_Spyra!_" Ignitia cried. She sailed in on a westward breeze and landed not too far off from Harad, a cabinet clattering onto the road as she lazed her paws, some books tumbling out the sides.

The fighting in the dirt stopped, and the two dragonesses turned to look at the assortment of people spectating the event. Spyra sat on Cynder's chest, panting, weakly tapping her on the snout with no energy left to punch.

"…._i-is that… is that my book cabinet?_" Cynder wheezed. "…_why… why the hell would you steal my book cabinet for?_"

"It's cherry wood." The Fallen noted with a shrug. "It probably looked pretty nice before… well… all this…"

"_T-T-T-Terror of the Skies~!_" Corrinthol shrieked, and tried to bury his head in the dirt like an ostrich. Torrdonal was chewing through his talons, and Morinth and Taliopia were hugging each other, eyes wide.

"Ancestors' blood." Harad shook his head, drinking in Cynder's prone form from tailtip to horns. "I never thought I would see… this close… _Cynder,_ the Cloud Ripper. You've killed many of my men, _general._"

"…I hardly believe you'd be the first in a long line of many." Cynder hissed, trying to roll Spyra off and failing with a tired slump. "…So now that you've all flattered yourselves by wiping out my army, destroying my tower and stealing my fucking bookshelf, can someone pry this purple nightmare off of me sometime today?"

"What the fuck is this thing anyway?" Spyra coughed, snatching up the brooch off Cynder's neck and squinting at it.

"It has crushed mint inside." Cynder snorted, batting at the dust floating everywhere. "The _mushrooms_ around here drive my sinuses to ruin…"

"Don't they…" Spyra trailed, leaning an elbow on her sternum. "…how's the fresh fall from power feel?"

"I don't believe it has quite set in yet." Cynder leaned her head back and huffed, her tail thumping. "…_but enemy to enemy, can you please lower your voice? I have a now _splitting_ headache…_"

"Uh… _boss-I mean, Mistress,_" Palmet nervously edged closer, waving cheaply when Cynder lazily glanced at him past her own cheekbone. "…I hope we don't ave any hard feelings about the employment shuffle here…"

"Who the hell are you, and why do I care?" Cynder breathed.

"I'm really glad that I could bring all of you together, this very moment…" The Fallen nodded, placing his hands on his hips. "…Dark and light, good guys and bad guys, Apes and dragons and _bad guy dragons,_ well, bad _girl_ dragon and… yeah it's all fantastic."

The human wheezed a single laugh.

"G'night."

-And collapsed on the ground, fast asleep.

* * *

{🐉}


	21. Chapter 20 - Homefront

**Dragon(s)layer**

**20**

* * *

**Homefront**

* * *

Everyone thought it had been a thunderstorm they had heard yesterday. It had sounded like the boom of a god's war drum, and it had rung over the land with might and anger. Clouds had formed later in the evening and it had rained, overflooding the peat puddles and weighing down the willows.

The only one who questioned the source of the booms outright was Firefly, and it seemed, strangely enough, that no one wanted to humor him, not even Lightnux, the one dragonfly in the world that Cometcu had always viewed as the strongest.

Ever since Spyra hadn't come home, her husband had been rendered near-mute. He fluttered around the bramble listlessly, his wings nothing but a disillusioned whisper to mark his passage.

"I was unable to help her." Lightnux had said last night, his eyes distant. "She had gone into the Mayfly shrine and was taking frustrations out on cloth and hay, and like a nitwitted fool I stood idle and watched."

"You cannot blame yourself." Cometcu soothed. "Spyra did not leave because of _you,_ or me, or Firefly. She will come back."

"Did the land whisper that to you?"

"In so few words." Cometcu sighed. Her meditations had shown her much. The catastrophic bursts of fire in the heartlands of the swamp, the panicked excitement of the trees, and the mumblings of the rocks…

Cometcu had remained landed in the little hideaway behind their thicket home for hours, convening with the plants through her very mind. Her antenna were blanketed in a pink glow, and her eyes had remained shut as alien tongues bubbled up from the back of her mandibles.

Plant speaking was a complicated art. Their language was not in voice, per-say, but it was in emotions and sensations. Pain, unfamiliarity, comfort, warmth, frostbite. Cometcu couldn't read the storm that was brewing through the swamps fast enough.

This was comparable to a person suffering from racing thoughts or mania. The swamp was babbling, because there was _too much to tell._ Cometcu could swear she had the beginnings of vertigo.

It meant that something either serenely beautiful, or utterly terrible had occurred. This of course had done nothing to soothe her burning worries or those of her husband's. It did not allow them to function during the day. Thus, time had frozen over their thicket home.

Though what Cometcu left out of her talks with Lightnux, was the sensation she had experienced when she had probed for the north of the swamps…

The dark ulcer.

The cancerous tumor spreading through and torturing the brush.

It was shrinking.

Later that day, Firefly had tried to go off into the wilderness after his adoptive sister. Lightnux had had to physically drag him back home.

Afterward, the distraught dragonfly had taken to sealing himself in his little room, refusing to come out to eat or speak with them. To Firefly, it was borderline murder.

How could they do this to Spyra when they claimed to love her?

But to Lightnux, the logic was simple: the village's Chieftain had already lost one child, and he wasn't about to lose another, even if he earned his malice for it.

"Remember when the two of you said Spyra was just as much your kid as I was?" Firefly had snapped when Cometcu had tried to console him. "Well, then why aren't we tearing this swamp apart looking for her?"

Cometcu had reached a point where she was just about ready to do that.

The unbearable sensation of a mother secreted from her own child. Not knowing where they were, what or who was with them…

Cometcu looked like a zombie-fly after what was comparatively a few days. Her color had diminished, her wings and face had aged and she was constantly dragging bags under her eyes. Lightnux was pretty much in the same boat. At least for _him_ it had taken just a tad longer.

But, when all hope seemed lost, the following day, after the clouds thinned and the air was warmed with the sun, she felt it.

She felt Spyra through the earth.

Cometcu gasped as reality rekindled in her head, her mandibles were open, as if she was making to speak. Seated on a little stone, ringed with field flowers, the dragonfly's pink glow subsided, her antenna laxed, and the flowers all lowered from their magically raised protrusions.

Cometcu was a blur as her wings buzzed, and she zipped through the back arch, the kitchen, the larder, and came out the front of the thicket, hovering.

She almost plowed face-first into a golden plated dragoness breast.

"…_S-Spyra?_" The dragonfly matron drunkenly stuttered.

"Heya', mom." Spyra grinned, her tail swaying. "How's everything been going?"

Instantly, Cometcu cried and darted forwards, latching onto Spyra's chest and hugging for dear life, a tumbling ramble flying out from her mandibles.

She babbled all kinds of stuff. How worried she was, how her father was lost, how her brother wasn't eating, how the entire village was terrified for her safety, how there was a fresh salamander steak she'd prepared that had gone untouched…

How, how _how._ How everything and everyone. Cometcu was inconsolable, and Spyra was okay with that.

She sat on the ground and giggled, linking her paws over the little insect to smush her into her chest as tightly as she could manage (without risk of _actual smushing _of course, she _was_ still a bug).

"…_Where were you? What happened?_" Cometcu finally breathed when her ranting ceased, looking at her adoptive daughter with pleading eyes. "Was it because of what I said? In the kitchen? When you came home with your brother? Spyra, I would never want to change who you are. I love you too much."

"I didn't leave because of some stupid disagreement." Spyra nuzzled her. "I had to come back for you, and dad, and my little bro'. I had to make sure _you_ all were okay, forget me."

"_Us?_" Cometcu squawked. "…This must have to do with the energies I have been feeling throughout the swamp. The plants have been babbling nonstop for days! M-Much like myself, just a few seconds ago…"

"I suppose they've seen a lot recently." Spyra craned an eye at some of the willows growing throughout the village. "…And frankly, so have I. Oh, mommy I have so much to tell you about. I've seen all these new places, and met so many people and-"

"_Places? People?_-" Cometcu sniffed, and retracted her head. "…and why do you smell so badly?"

Cometcu fluttered her wings and paused.

"Oh I don't care. _I'm just so happy you're okay._" The dragonfly hummed and buried her little face in Spyra's plates. "I'm so happy you've come home. I need to get Lightnux, and Firefly-! They'll be so happy to see you! _Everyone_ will be so happy to see you…"

Other dragonflies were starting to materialize from the woodwork, of all colors and shades. Many of them were whispering, some of them cried out as they gathered around the front of Spyra's thicket home.

"_She's back!_"

"_Look! Spyra's back!_"

"_She's okay!_"

Spyra hugged her mom and looked around, picking out faces she recognized. The entire village was buzzing over, creating a rainbow of bobbing wisp lights. People started cheering, some started clapping.

"…Wow…" The dragon grinned. "I didn't think everyone would care so much."

Cometcu started to cry again of course. All Spyra could do was roll her eyes in happy embarrassment and mutter- '_Mooommmm…' _–while patting her wings.

"You went out into the swamps?"

Spyra looked down and saw one of the younger dragonflies, ironically, _Wingwhip _himself, one of Firefly's little turd friends. The red dragonfly was gazing at her with platter eyes, his hands luckily empty this time, no tail-pinning.

"Yeah, I went into the swamps." Spyra flashed him a dangerous smile. "_And_ I went into the Forbidden Funguswood."

"…_Totally?_" Wingwhip gasped.

"Totally, dude, like whole way perpendicular madness on the highest dial." Spyra angled a thumb and pinky.

"_Duuudddeee…._" Wingwhip droned.

"Oh, and check it:" Spyra opened her mouth, awing the crowd as bolts of electricity danced between her fangs like reams of ice. "-ya' ever want to play _pin the tail on the dragon_ again, buddy, that's a'ight. I'm game. But as long as we get to play _Bugzapper!_"

Wingwhip screamed like a little girl and zipped away. Spyra cackled and clipped the electricity. That at least sorted out _one_ little problem...

But where was-

"_Spyra!_"

Everybody looked at the arch frame to the family thicket. A golden dragonfly- one Spyra knew very well –was sluggishly coming through, eyes locked on the purple dragon.

"Sup', bro." Spyra flashed a grin.

Firefly didn't look amused.

"_You stupid asshat!_" He screamed, and the whole crowd went silent after a hushed gasp.

"Ouch." Spyra winced. "Don't tell me I forgot something before I left… did we have chores? Mom and dad dumped 'em all on ya' at once or something? Or, are you so blinded by my radiant beauty that you've gone delusional?"

Firefly buzzed up into Spyra's snout, a very angry expression written on his stone-cold face.

"…Aw, Firefly… I'm sorry…" Spyra dropped the act with a sigh. "…I didn't-"

"_I thought you were dead and you aren't!_" Firefly sobbed.

There was a slapping noise as the young fly adhered to Spyra's neck and hugged tightly.

"_My giant, hideous, purple sister…_" Firefly sniffled.

"…Yeahyeah… I love you too, anus-face…" Spyra giggled. "Evening's cold out, folks, I already got two flies on me, anyone else wanna' a spot on the dragon-hug pole?"

"_Me!_" It was Sapwing. The old coot was buzzing over and his tired wings, arms open. "_My best customer! You're alive!_" He wheezed.

"Yes _alive._" Spyra grinned cheaply, holding out a wing to buffer the soapmaker. "And totally unwilling to get hugged by an old guy."

"…Ah," Sapwing reclined with a chuckle. "-just as usual. At least my night feels somewhat normal again."

"Would you be willing to hug _this_ old guy?" –Came a voice.

The crowd suddenly began to part, and the cheers became hushed whispers. Spyra turned with her mother and brother still clutched in her arms to see a blue orb of light slowly parting the walls of color.

Lightnux's wings buzzed in the quiet breeze, his face unreadable as he crossed the distance to his daughter, and hovered just ahead of her nose.

"H-Hey, dad." Spyra sheepishly said. "…Long time no moody dragon, eh?"

Lightnux didn't answer her, he simply touched his forehead to hers, holding her cheeks, where he soothed her with a happy, deep sigh. The Chieftain regained color before her very eyes, having approached her as a pale ghost.

"My daughter." He kept saying, rubbing her scales. "_Home._"

"I love you guys." Spyra closed her eyes. Everything in the world felt right in that moment. Complete perfection.

But strangely, the crowd was still murmuring, and was still parted.

Lightnux, Firefly and Cometcu peered up from the dragoness and gazed to where Spyra had come from, to the front of the village itself.

Two boot heels crunched through dirt, one falling faster than the other, as a six-foot tall, upright creature unsteadily limped into their presence.

The Fallen wiped some blood from his lower lip, and stood just before the dragonflies, his eyes wandering over the beautiful assortment of colors dancing off their fluorescent wings.

He opened his mouth to speak, but faltered. Spyra laughed. It was like when he had first crashed here all over again.

"…Guys, this is my… uhm… _friend._" Spyra finally decided after rolling the sentence on her tongue for awhile. She didn't sound certain, and none of the insects around her _looked_ certain either. They all had wide eyes, gaping mandibles and jittering wings. The fact that nobody else was even offering a gasp, muttered concerns or anything just made it heavier. "…W-We kind of… saved each other's lives a few times, over the last week or so."

"…Nice to meet all of you." The Fallen offered quietly.

_That_ caused the whole crowd to gasp.

"It speaks!" –Someone cried.

"Oh come on, I don't look _that_ stupid do I?" The Fallen rubbed his aching temples, grumbling. "…Listen, I've had a really long and trying night getting your dragon back to you and saving your swamp, so, excuse me if I seem a little disheveled." He gestured to the mess about himself.

_Disheveled_ was certainly one word. Here stood a giant, skin-covered simian, wearing strange one-piece clothes, with crude Ape weapons hanging off of him, speckled with dried blood, crusted sewage, and strewn with cuts and bruises. None of the dragonflies knew what to say.

"…He's… _tall._" Firefly whispered. The Fallen daggered a brow and opened his mouth.

" -_AHT!_" Spyra startled everyone by jamming a talon in the air. "Don't you say it!"

The Fallen's snickers were scythed when pain flared in his ribs. He grunted and nursed himself.

"Village, _Fallen_, Fallen, _village_." Spyra gestured. "Welcome to my _abode._"

"It's lovely." The Fallen smiled. "And really quiet too."

"_I know._" Spyra was awestruck, her mouth gaping. "I think the same thing every day! Mom, dad, me and this dude? Like, _so alike,_ totally."

"I'll be the judge of _that._" Firefly detached himself and zipped up in the Fallen's face, the human reclining with a surprised blink. "What's your business with my sis', stranger?"

"…_Welllll…_" The Fallen awkwardly droned.

"Leave him alone, Firefly, he's cool." Spyra nuzzled Lightnux as she spoke. "He saved my life."

"…The north…" Cometcu dumbly pointed at both of them. "That explosion yesterday?"

"It's complicated." The human rubbed his neck.

"…So, uhm… _yeah,_ me and my _best friend _here have gotten pretty… _ahem CLOSE _over the last few days, and I, well… I kinda' preemptively invited him to dinner." Spyra suggested, rubbing her paws on her parents to regain their locked attentions. "I figured you'd wanna' meet my boyf-_uhm~! –_my _friend,_ my friend who saved me from the Forbidden Funguswood."

"Your friend." Lightnux parroted dumbly. "…What _is_ he?"

"Human. My name-" The warrior paused, wincing when he took a step forward and offered his hand, and the crowd backed away like a receding wave of living Christmas lights. "-you can call me the Fallen."

"_Fallen._" Lightnux tentatively reached out and wrapped his fingers around the human's palm, holding them there for a second before retracting. "It was you who whisked my daughter out into the wilderness?"

"Not exactly." The Fallen smiled. "She found me, I found her, we found we worked well together, so I stuck around. That, and I greatly enjoy her company." He winked. Spyra snorted laughter so harshly she felt compelled to slap a paw over her mouth.

Firefly's mandibles were ajar.

Since when was Spyra… _bubbly?_

"I see." Lightnux glanced between them. "…Then, I must ask you to stay and fully explain what has happened. My village extends its hospitality to you in full."

"Thank you." The Fallen bowed as low as he could, hissing when his ribs flared. "-Does the same go for the rest of our group?"

"_Group?_" Lightnux snapped. "What group?"

There was a hideous, shrill wailing in the night. The cry of a beast that echoed through the whole village. Many in the crowd screamed and daggered about in panic.

"_Nownow _yu stop that, Meep, plug it up! Ya ain't got to do them sewer-moanins no more, everyone ere's friendly…"

"Why didn't we drown him?" Spyra glumly uttered.

"Ooo! Lookatdat! There's glowin bugs everywhere! They're so purteh." Palmet lumbered up to the edge of the crowd, smiling with his hideous fangs.

"**_Meep._**" Meep chirped, a black, wriggling hand on the Ape's shoulder.

"…So _this_ is where all my future slaves were supposed to come from?" Cynder chuffed, flexing her arms against the bonds across her wrists as she was dragged unceremoniously across the ground on a pallet they'd taken from Forlorn's wreckage. Harad and Corrinthol grunted as they tugged her along via rope-link. Cynder snorted and turned her nose up to the village. "It's a mud pile, not worthy of my station."

"That's _my_ mud pile you're talking about." Spyra reminded. "See, mom, dad? I took my first prisoner of war! Aren'tchya proud?"

"**_War?_**" –Lightnux and Cometcu parroted at once.

"Yes, congratulations." Cynder rolled her eyes and sulked on the pallet. "Flaunt me like the trophy I've become, I suppose you deserve the boasting rights."

"Cheeky that, this is cozy." Morinth smiled, trotting along at the head of the liberated Mole band with Taliopia and Torrdonal. "It's a nice and fine little place, don't you think, Tali'?"

"It looks a little unsanitary." Taliopia bit her chop at the sight of the thicket homes. However, her initial attitude changed the moment she laid eyes on the dragonflies.

All at once, Taliopia went still, her gaze fixated on a red dragonfly at the edges of the crowd. Spyra knew that particular fellow as Ridgflite, one of her neighbors.

"_Oh my god…_" Taliopia gasped, her paws flying up to her snout.

"I didn't know there was more than one dragon." Ridgflite stupidly gawked.

He should've fled for his little life.

Suddenly, a very girlish squeal ripped through the night. Ridgflite's panicked cries were muffled as Taliopia bounded forwards, and swept the little insect into her chest to snuggle him tightly.

"_THEY'RESOADORABLE-!_" The medic squeed, oblivious to Ridgflite's calls for help. "_IWANTONE-!_"

"_Darling,_ it isn't polite to snuggle the native population against their _wiillllssss~._" Morinth sang.

"Morri-poo! I want one." Taliopia looked manic, like she'd been slipped a substance or something. Morinth blinked at the glassy look in her lover's rose eyes. "Can I keep him?"

Morinth opened her mouth, but Taliopia whipped her head over to Spyra instead.

"_Can I keep him?_"

Ridgflite's scream was muffled by dragon scales.

"Greetings, Chieftain Lightnux of the dragonfly tribe." Harad stepped closer, intimidating the whole crowd with his brawn. It was quite the sight to watch the mighty earth dragon bow his head low to the little blue fly hovering between the Fallen and Spyra. "I am Captain Harad, Wing organizer of the Dragon Realms, and the City of Warfang. Your graciousness for housing us is most appreciated."

"_Don't be deceived, he's a capital D dick._" Spyra whispered to her family. "Yeah, this is _Harasal_ everybody, he helped us too…"

"It's pronoun-" The Captain clenched his jaw. "…_nevermind._"

"Chieftain?"

Spyra noticeably deflated as Ignitia stepped beside the Captain, giving her own bow.

"My name is Ignitia, I am the Guardian of Fire, and Wingleader to the Captain."

The Guardian's eyes danced all over the little insects. The Fallen scrutinized silently and noticed her examining them, most likely wondering about the surrogate family that had taken in the egg she had viewed as her own.

Of course, he was going out on a limb about that.

But judging by the way she acted all the time around Spyra, he couldn't have been far off the mark. They'd need to have a chat later, including most importantly an express apology that he had recited for her.

"-_Corrinthol!_" Torrdonal was hissing to shut Corrinthol up nearby, though the Fallen picked out a few statements that sounded suspiciously like- '_This place is a dump!'_ –and- '_I'm not sleeping in a mud-pit like this._'

"Wha-?" Corrinthol noticed the Chieftain and his CO's and scrambled over, bowing like an idiot on his forepaws. " Corrinthol, Wingsoldier of Warfang, at your service. Might I say that your openness is awe-inspiring, Chieftain."

Spyra gagged and the Fallen's nose was scrunched, like he'd been slammed with a particularly foul smell.

"Torrdonal, Wingsoldier." Torrdonal kneeled slightly. "…You people don't have any large bodies of water around here, do you?"

Firefly brightened.

"-_No, shush-!_" Spyra tried.

"Yeah, we got the nymph pond in the back." Firefly jammed a thumb.

Torrdonal shuddered as a look of horror bloomed on his face.

"-_W-Water-!_" He cried, his eyes crossing. "-_Wet and dark and terrible-! Noooooo…_"

"…I'm getting more and more embarrassed by the second." Everyone looked over when Cynder's sultry voice came about. The black dragoness- even being a prisoner –looked like she was lounging on the pallet underneath her, her white eyes glimmering with perception. "I've withstood frontline engagements with these dragons, and those filthy little Moles back there, leading my Mistress' Dark Army at the forefront. A whole career of spotless perfection and _terror._ All of that, and now as this scroll is being unwound further and further, I'm truly seeing that I was just beaten today by a motley horde of imbeciles."

Cynder paused, a sweet little sigh coming out of her beak.

"Isn't life so _delicious_ and interesting?"

"…A-And who is _she?_" Lightnux was experiencing a bit of shellshock, and he sounded disoriented. Not one foreigner (barring his daughter) in six-hundred years, and now? A crowd!

His little brain must have packed a suitcase and bummed out halfway.

"_This_ is a very dangerous war criminal to our people and the world." Ignitia distastefully glared. "Her name is _Cynder._"

"Charmed." Cynder gave a smile and a little wiggle of her neck. Her eyes trailed to Ignitia next and wandered down her shapely backside. "…My my, Ignitia, how long has it been, really? You've let yourself go."

The Fallen made a sneezing sound, his eyes twitching as he forced himself to stop staring at the Guardian's magnificent ass.

"_Thankfully_ she is entrapped in a spell's ward of my casting." Ignitia ignored her, appearing pleasant for Lightnux. "She will prove no danger to anyone here, and I will ensure that the seal remains pure throughout our brief stay here."

"Yes, she's quite the magic crafter…" Cynder rolled her tied-up wings over and exposed the small of her elegant back. Many gasped to see a glowing, orange rune pulsating from her jet black scales. It was in the shape of a dragon's head, ringed by little flames that moved silently as they observed, like caterpillars. "…It clashes with the rest of my collection, however…"

Cynder preened her neck, showing off the beautiful, glowing blue runes pulsating down her face and shoulders.

"I can't expect everyone to be a formal stylist. But did you have to make it so revealing?"

"Silence, prisoner!" Spyra snapped, hitting Cynder in the face with a tossed stick. The Terror of the Skies produced a reptilian howl that made everyone jump, her body art now glowing a faint red as she glared at the purple beastess hatefully. "Hey! That was fun! I like having prisoners, I should do it more often."

"I cannot disagree." The Fallen chuckled. "…Is there anywhere secluded around here? We need to keep her outside the thickets, just in case."

"_Yes,_ just in case." Cynder wiggled forwards on the palette, bearing her red breast for the human with a gleeful grin. "The human has proven unbelievable in combat, I believe _he_ should be my sentry for the night."

"Guarding you will be taken in shifts." Ignitia blocked Cynder's appetizing gaze to the Fallen, making the latter growl in disappointment. "Your time of terrorizing the realms will finally come to an end, Cynder, you will face justice for all you have done, including the destruction of a prized draconic artifact. The Forlorn Watch is gone, along with so much of its history."

"Do not weep, Ignitia, you pilfered so much from my nook at the tip-top. I'm sure you recovered enough of your precious library to keep younglings bored and drooling in your elaborately meaningless schools for generations…" Cynder scooted over and locked eyes with the Fallen, licking her chops. "…And it was the human's dynamite that saw the tower to ruination, don't forget that…"

"He acted out of necessity." Ignitia said. "That is what happens when leaders engage in homicidal behavior and force their neighbors to retaliate. The blood and stone on your claws has finally caught up to you."

"There's an empty thicket, over there, by the edge of the subsidiary pool in that grove." One of the dragonflies pointed between some trees. "It's secluded, you could keep her there."

"So quick are they to trust you." Cynder looked at Spyra. "No wonder you inherited such blind faith, Lonesome One."

"Not lonesome anymore, bitch." Spyra detached from her mother and sidled up to the Fallen, hip-bumping him. "I've got all the _warm,_ beefy companionship I need." Spyra gestured to her family, but Cynder knew what she really meant…

The black dragoness was snarling.

"Yeah, I am pretty buff." Firefly posed, making some girl dragonflies giggle in the crowd. "Isn't that right, sis'? My chiseled abs are to die for."

"_Pah,_ and the tiny insects have an _ego._ Talk about unbelievable." Corrinthol wandered off with Torrdonal. "I call the warmest thicket!"

"Are there any thickets that are particularly dry?" Torrdonal asked someone in the crowd.

"I don't mean to impose none," A Mole appeared by Ignitia's flank, gesturing to the small crowd gathering in the center of the village. "-but could we please get some food? They were only giving us bread scraps."

"Certainly." Lightnux took the initiative. "I'll have our village chefs prepare a group meal. I hope our cuisine is enough for larger-folk."

"With meat additives, it ain't half bad." Spyra chimed. "I don't think I've ever been so eager to eat salamander before."

* * *

{🐉}

The dragonflies eventually worked through a period of confusion to elation. It seemed very shortly after the group had arrived, the insects were ecstatic about hosting a- '_Foreigner Gathering' –_.

In the meantime, the party bathed themselves of the detritus of their battle. Spyra was eager as she dragged the Fallen inside her little thicket home and plopped him in the wooden tub she'd talked so much about, drenching them both in water and soap and forcing him to bathe with her.

"I wanted to do this since we got out of the temple." Spyra said as she sat in his sud-covered lap, flicking a bubble off his nose and giggling when he flinched. "..._Bath buddy~._"

When they had gotten to the drying-off part, Spyra had made him dance by whipping his backside with her drying cloth several times, only being forced to stop when he tackled her into her nest and kissed her into submission.

"...Y'know I used to sit in this room and fantasize about having a male with me." Spyra said, looking around at her little nook. "I didn't actually think I ever really would. Life's strange, dude."

"Tell me about it." The Fallen chuckled.

The other dragons soaked off in one of the ponds ringing the village, they were given the surplus of the soap Saphide made for Spyra, as evidently, the whole time during her absence, he had still been making bars for her in denial of something happening to her. Spyra did take a free moment to consul the older fly a little while later, even allowing him to hold her paw and laugh with her. He was a good friend, he deserved the attention, to know she was well.

Palmet even tried the dragonfly soap, but forgot to rinse off. He had been waddling around the village looking like a yeti for over twenty minutes before the Fallen found him and led him back to the pond to get all the suds off. Meep looked like a white ball hopping on the Ape's head the whole time, slurping up suds with a previously unseen mouth in the flower of his tentacles and belching out bubbles.

"If you think I'm going to stand idle and watch you all pamper yourselves, you're most certainly mistaken..." Cynder snarled from her pallet.

Spyra had responded by dumping a bucket of water over her head, laughing when the black dragoness shrieked and hatefully stared her down. The Fallen eyed the lines of rope tethering Cynder's form, blinking at them before turning back to the more pressing matter ahead.

Dragonflies brought out baskets of berries and apples, pitchers of amber-beer, and bowls of root-pulp stew (which given the name, actually proved quite popular with the Moles) and salamander steaks, though for the latter there were only a handful, and Spyra ate most of them, talking with her mouth full in reams to the Fallen and Ignitia.

The dragonflies lit little lanterns in the center of the village, bathing the normally aqua deep blue night a strange mix of such and amber. The shadows playing through the trees, mixing with the laughter of Moles and insects striking conversations, was fantastic.

_Peaceful._

The Fallen could see why Spyra hadn't gone mad despite everything she'd told him of herself. She had a lovely home with lovely people. People the size of his hand, but people nonetheless.

The dragonflies didn't have furniture for larger species, so the Moles took to sitting in a wide circle on stumps, overturned buckets and mats laid out, dragonflies dotting the grounds around them as curious younglings asked all kinds of questions about the outside world. Some of the bolder denizens of the village had taken to perching on shoulders, wrists and kneecaps, of which the delighted Moles did not seem to mind.

Harad was mostly silent throughout the night, though an occasional joke among the masses earned a glimmer of a smile from him once or twice. He was very stoic. Spyra spent half a mouthful listing off a number of insults to the Fallen regarding a large pole crammed up the Captain's ass.

Corrinthol had complained about pretty much everything the dragonflies had brought out, his fussiness culminating in him attempting to swipe a salamander steak off Spyra's platter.

"_Hey!_" The Purple Dragon snapped. "My mommy cooked those for me and _me_ only, shitbreath!"

The Fallen hadn't actually _seen_ it, per-say (he was too busy striking up a conversation with a pair of Moles fascinated by his lack of fur) but he had heard the charismatic _zap_, and had caught a flash of yellow in the back of the gathering.

Corrinthol promptly danced away, shouting all kinds of insults and wanton cries with a black blister forming just beside the base of his tail. The Fallen outright pointed and laughed despite a few disapproving looks.

_Stick it, shiteater._

At one point, as Spyra sat chewing happily with way too large bites of food, Ignitia had come to quietly set down beside her, keeping a respectful distance, but leaning close.

"…Spyra, may I speak with you for a moment? I promise I won't take long." She smiled hopefully.

"_Huh?_ Oh, it's you… uhm… _yeah,_ yeah what do you got on yer' mind, Ignitia." Spyra had difficulty maintaining eye-contact as she shoved an entire apple in her snout and crunched it, core and all, juice fleeing down her chin.

"I wanted to talk with you about the tower…" Ignitia folded her forepaws cat-like and doted on them. "…Inside Cynder's observatory, as I was collecting all of those books and those scrolls, I realized that I had made a terrible error, an extreme lapse in my own judgment…"

"…Okay?" Spyra awkwardly trailed, appearing only to half pay attention as she devoured seconds of everything she could grab. An apple rolled off her stuffed platter in the brief pause, her tail idly curling around and swatting it back into place.

"…Spyra I should've gone into the catacombs with you, to help free the prisoners, and to lead Morinth and Taliopia, like a true Wingleader should. But most importantly to prote-" Ignitia reconsidered her words, knowing Spyra's temper. "-_to help you_, and make sure you were alright, for my own sake. I confused my passions for my responsibilities. I pledged the moment I saw you in the temple that I would not lose you again, like I lost you all those years ago. Spyra, I am _sorry,_ I am so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?"

The flame dragoness' fins preened as she gazed to Spyra with a warm, but desperate smile. She was prepared for a lashing out, or a request for her to leave, but Ignitia knew deep inside that she _needed_ Spyra to say it was alright.

Spyra looked conflicted as she swallowed a last mouthful of salamander jerky and looked down at her platter, picking at something between some of her food.

"…Look, Ignitia, it's… it's fine. I mean, we are where we are, after, I dunno', two decades? Bordering on it? I technically breathe every day because you floated me down that river. I owe you more than I could ever ask of you, y'know?"

Spyra met the Guardian's eyes and blinked at the level of affection blossoming in Ignitia's gaze. Her wings were twitching, and her paws were kneading into her wrists.

"Thank you." Ignitia sighed, her voice whimsical as she bowed her taller head. "..I needed to get that off my wings."

"It's no problem." Spyra grinned and nudged closer to her platter, idly chewing. When Ignitia didn't move, she looked at her again and wing-shrugged. "…is that all, or…?"

"_Oh,_ no, that was all…" Ignitia blushed and stood bolt upright, her tail curling in embarrassment behind her. She bowed and started to angle away. "I won't disturb you any further."

"A'ight, I'll check ya' later I gue-"

"-_Actually,_ you wouldn't mind if I sat down, would you? Next to you? Here?"

"…No, go ahead." Spyra blinked. The Guardian was back on the ground faster than she'd made to leave it, sidling closer than she was before.

Their eyes met, and Ignitia smiled toothily, humming and breaking the link when Spyra quirked a brow.

"This is quite a beautiful home you have." The Guardian said.

"_Pfft,_ you should smell it in the morning…" Spyra chuffed. "Yeah, it's not bad. It's just too quiet for me. Nothing ever gets done. All the dragonflies do really, is buzz around, fart glitter, make soap, cut fruit, sweep thicket floors…"

"That sounds lovely." Ignitia breathed. "Such humble lifestyles! I just might retire here when my Rite of Transfer comes along. Ah, but that is so far away…"

"Rite of whatchya' call it?" Spyra asked.

"_Rite of Transfer!_" Ignitia laughed. "As one of the Four Guardians of Warfang, it is my job to teach young dragons how to control and understand their element. Well, _fire_ purely. My sisters handle their respective elements and the students who apply to them. It depends on a dragon's breath, I mentor all fire-breathers brought to the academy."

"So what's the Rite for? That sounds like a solid gig."

"When a Guardian becomes old enough, they can request a Rite of Transfer, it's…. oh, a proper comparison… _knighthood!_ The process of a knight training a squire as their apprentice, and eventually bestowing their station to that apprentice when they believe they have mastered their craft." Ignitia explained. "I did not earn my position as Guardian through a Rite, my predecessor is an anomaly, I'm afraid."

"What do you mean?" Spyra shoved a wad of berries in her mouth. "_Yur da bookworm, nuffin shuld be unkobn tu yu._"

"That's the tricky part of it. It isn't only me, it's everyone in Warfang. Nobody knows what happened to Scarla Razorwing, she disappeared over forty-five years ago." Ignitia said. "Part of that might have been because she broke the Oaths of Abstinence."

Spyra hacked as she swallowed wrong, and gazed up at Ignitia in horror.

"You're tellin' me it's against the law for you people to fuck?!"

"In brash terms." Ignitia flushed and flicked at a pebble. "It's more complicated than that. The rule doesn't apply to other dragons, but Guardians have always practiced celibacy since the dawn times of the Dragon Realms. Our lives are to be wholly dedicated to our chosen element. But that goes along with a greater understanding of meditative intrigue, and inner peace. You can also pursue paths of combat, knowledge and discovery that most dragons can only dream of. It really isn't as bad as the prerequisites make it sound."

"…I dunno'," Spyra looked across all the Moles and dragonflies taking up the center of the village, her eyes locking on the Fallen as he browed a series of banquet platters laid out for picking. "…I guess that exempts me from the roster by default."

"_What._" Ignitia croaked, startling herself with her tone. She coughed. "Pardon me. I meant to ask: _how so?_"

"I ain't a virgin." Spyra cockily winked. "Least not anymore."

"O-Oh…" Ignitia's face sunk.

Someone had touched her hatchling… _more_ than touched…

Ignitia shook her head.

_She isn't of my nest, nor have I claim to her life._

"…But I thought we were the only dragons you had encountered so far? Ever." She stared.

"You are." Spyra jammed a pawful of baked sunflower seeds in her maw, chewing like an ox.

"…So then…" Ignitia raised her neck and surveyed the village. Her eyes fell on Corrinthol. "…_Certainly not._"

"_Ugh-! _Gawd', _hell no._ That guy's a fudgepacker." Spyra traced Ignitia's gaze and shuddered. "And a _bitch._ Can't hook up with a male who's a bitch."

"Was it… it couldn't have been _Torrdonal?_"

"…Why is this any of your business?" Spyra waited for an answer, but all Ignitia seemed capable of doing was flexing her mouth around, like she was cracking a stiff hinge in her jaw. "_No,_ it wasn't any of your Wing."

"Are you telling me you mated with someone who _isn't_ a dragon?"

"Maybe. Look, I shouldn't have mentioned it, alright, you were talkin' and I was just shooting the breeze because you're really awkward to talk to…"

"I am?" Ignitia looked flabbergasted. "Heavens, why am I awkward to talk to, Spyra? Was it something I said? _Or did? _It's because I asked about the... the _mates_ thing isn't it?"

"…I dunno'…" Spyra wing-shrugged. "…It's just… I see the way you act, and I see the way you look at me."

Spyra nodded over to her family's thicket, where Lightnux and Cometcu were laughing at the combined jokes from Firefly and- strangely –_Palmet,_ who apparently had such a good streak of punchlines, that Cometcu couldn't breathe.

"It's how Cometcu looked at me when I first opened my eyes on my hatchday." She glanced at Ignitia. "…I wasn't _alive,_ in a sense, for a lot of your time with my egg, and I can't imagine how you felt basically letting me go down a stream, and hoping it all worked out-"

"Like someone had torn my heart from my breast." Ignitia choked. "I have never felt such guilt, and dread in my entire life, and never will again. A part of me died that night. I do not think I will ever get it back."

"…Like I said, it sucks, everything that's happened. The Apes, Malefora, the south being abandoned and all those eggs being lost." Spyra sighed. "But, Ignitia? I already have a mom."

For a moment, Ignitia didn't know what to say. It felt like someone had electrocuted her and rendered her stunned. She recalled an instance of shellshock, _real_ shellshock, years ago, during one of her first battles leading Warfangian soldiers. A catapult round had landed among their positions, close enough to toss Ignitia to the ground and cover her in dirt.

A tinny whine.

That was all she heard then, it was all she heard now.

But the battle had been easy. Her hearing had returned fully at its conclusion. This…?

"…_Oh._" She smiled, expertly clamping down on her jaw to prevent it from quivering. "Well I certainly understand that, and I respect your feelings on the matter."

"…Yeah I don't mean to be a jerk or anything, I just-"

"It is okay, Spyra. It is very okay." Ignitia settled on her haunches, coldness stabbing her underneath her pleasant demeanor. "It's okay."

It didn't feel okay, and they still had a long night ahead of them...

* * *

{🐉}


	22. Chapter 21 - Personal Collusion

**Dragon(s)layer**

**21**

* * *

**Personal Collusion**

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: A Swamp Hide and Seek}_**

* * *

Taliopia was hunting people.

Well, only if they were _dragonflies._

At least she wasn't actually hurting anybody. Maybe, there was some emotional scarring, but other than that, it was fine. Some of the younger dragonflies even seemed to like it.

"_Cuddles from the draggy!_" –A little female one had cried, promptly being swiped and bundled in Taliopia's arms, the medic humming compliments on her wing color and glow as she snuggled the insect.

"Is she usually like this?" The Fallen quirked a brow and sipped on a clay mug just a little bigger than a thimble filled with this _amber-beer _stuff the dragonflies had been on about. He preferred alcohol really sweet, and this drink was perfect. If only there was more of it...

"You should see her when it's anything small and fuzzy." Morinth wriggled her talons, sitting beside him and watching the spectacle of bug-snatchery and Taliopia's squees. She was munching on a pear. "She has a _huuggee_ collection of stuffed animals at her home in Warfang. Her family's rich, and her father buys her all kinds of plushes. He _used_ to, anyway, before they signed her up for the draft."

"Your people have a draft?" He glanced at her.

"Yes." Morinth took a nibble out of her pear, sighing around the bite. "The war with the Dark Continent has been going on for so long, that there are years where we can't get enough soldiers."

"…Casualty rates?"

"No, but they aren't something to dismiss either. There simply aren't enough of us that are young and physically fit enough to cover all the fronts. That's why we rely on the Moles and their technology so much. Their cannons and flintlocks have held many a theatre no dragon could." Morinth twitched her wings and sized him up out the corner of her eye. "You have an awful lot of military-speak about you, Fallen."

"I have an awful lot of military experience." He clarified. "With habits comes the talk. I've had to fight way more than I initially wanted to."

"Initially?"

"…Well," He refilled his bottle-cap cup with a quick dip of the pitcher on the platter behind them. "after a while I… might've started to get some mild enjoyment out of it all."

"Mm." Morinth tossed the core of her pear in one of the wastebaskets lying around the gathering. "So you like killing?"

"If the targets did something to deserve it. Upfront solutions normally pave the way for a better future." He shrugged. "The trouble is, I'm constantly having to fight people who I don't _want_ to fight. But many times, folks leave me without a choice. So ole' Fallen has to run in and dropkick them in the balls."

Morinth laughed.

"Tell me your real name. I promise, I won't let it _sliiiippp~._" She sang, her emerald eyes shimmering.

"I don't have a name." He was staring in those green pools.

That perfumy scent slapped him upside the head.

He turned around, abandoned his little cup and came back with the whole pitcher, drowning anything that might've started in a wash of amber-beer as he tipped it into his mouth.

"Everybody has a name, even if their parents weren't around to say it was official." Morinth pressed. "When I was living in the underways of Warfang as a hatchling, there were plenty of vagrants who had named themselves, and that was what everyone called them. Fallen's a _title._ What do you go by?"

"…_pwah…_" He gasped, finishing off the pitcher and punching his chest for a little belch. "…_usually_ I'm just- '_that guy' _–but everywhere I go seems to like _Fallen._ It follows me, like a really bad smell. Every world I go to, people always think I'm _falling,_ or that I fell. I don't know why, I have pretty good balance."

"Is that always how you make your entrances into worlds? You fall from the sky in an asteroid?"

"…It's happened once or twice." He looked around as he put the little pitcher back. "Look, the monkey literally named his new octopus-buddy after a sound the thing made. If I want to name myself after the catastrophic sub-orbital impacts I've suffered repeatedly I have that right."

"Cheeky, 'course you do." Morinth chirped, her eyes wandering down his legs. "…Do humans have any hobbies?"

"I'm sure plenty of them do, me myself, ones that I'm unable to pursue."

"How come?"

"…Ahm," He gestured to himself and everything around them. "…I'm the _Fallen._ Falling in a world near _you_ right after the last freaking one."

Morinth giggled.

"You're funny." She smiled. "Are all humans funny at least?"

"Only the screwed up ones." He sighed.

"Do you sing?"

"If you like the tune of dying ox, I suppose I could indulge you."

"_No!_" She laughed. "Have you ever tried? It's real easy once you get the hang of it. You just, sit back, close your eyes, _aannddd leettt the song taakkkkee youuuuu~._"

"So, why don't you sing for everybody?" The Fallen asked.

"…_What?_" Morinth shrunk back, and brought her tail around to hold in her paws. "_No,_ no, that would be silly… besides, my CO isn't exactly _endearing _in his attitude every day, and half my squadmates are boobs."

"_Boobs?!_" The Fallen stood rigid. "_Where?!_"

"What are you on about?" She blinked.

"-_What-?! B-Boobs- I- oh…._" He sulked. "…I keep forgetting that those are _alien_ around these parts." He glared at her sloping, gunmetal chest. "Though the rotundness of your bodies is quite lovely."

Morinth giggled and let her tail go, where it started to whip about in a frenzy behind her.

"If I were to _sing…_ would you listen?" She asked.

"Of course I would."

* * *

{🐉}

"-so that's when the dynamite went off, and _kerblammm! _The tower started to come down, and me and the Fallen jumped out the gates just in time!" Spyra recounted for Firefly, Lightnux and Cometcu, all of whom had gathered around her with a few other dragonflies and Ignitia and were listening intently. "…I don't want to say it so bluntly, but eh… we were kinda' sorta' _badass._"

"He sounds like a very skilled fighter." Lightnux scanned the village. "I'm glad he has dedicated his talents at least to a side of seeming good."

"Warfang is interested in preserving peace." Ignitia said nearby. "We seek to abolish the Dark Army and restore the world to its natural order. Today was a great step towards that goal."

"All in one battle too," Spyra shook her head. "Chieftain Visigoth, his whole rat-ass tribe, a whole flight of Dreadwings, all gone! _And_ we captured Cyndy-Two-Shoes."

"I sense great darkness in that creature." Cometcu's antenna were poking towards the edge of the village, where a dark, secluded thicket house stood, a torch lit in the entryway clearly illuminating a quad of dragonflies guarding the arch from the dragoness tied up inside. "She has been molded into something by very evil powers. Yet, for all that blackness seething inside her, I couldn't help but feel pity for the mournful presence underneath it all."

"What was it? A lingering sense of _jealousy_ 'cause of how cool I am?" Spyra joked.

"Only as cool as an old salamander pie." Firefly quipped. Spyra threw a cup at him and nearly hit Lightnux.

"…a tiny voice _screaming _to be let out." Cometcu silently recanted. "That poor dragon."

"_Hey! _Could everyone, stop what they're doing? Look over here! _Hey! HEY!_" The Fallen tried waving his arms a few times, but only a few folks took notice. With a disgruntled puff through his lips, he picked Spyra out across the village and waved at her. "_Spyra!_"

"_Yo! It's my human!_" Spyra leaped up, her wings flapping to keep her in a hover. "_Whatchyu' need, my boi'toy?_"

"_I need a crowd-silencer!_"

"_You got it, babe!_"

"Did she just call the alien '_babe'?_" Firefly leaned over to his father.

Spyra landed on her haunches and reared back, a jet of fire spilling into the air and illuminating the whole village in a shade of amber.

There were a few startled shouts, but after the flames crackled and whooshed, Spyra cut the breath attack and staggered back on her hinds, grinning dopishly.

"_That_ got all yer' attentions!" She laughed. "The Fallen's trying to say something!"

Dragonflies, Moles and dragons all put their eyes in the center of the village, where the human stood, nodding gratefully at Spyra.

"…Yeah, uhm, thank you Spyra, for clearing that up. Everybody," He held a hand out to his flank. "Morinth would like to sing for us."

A few coos of interest rose up from the crowd as the black and gunmetal dragoness stepped to the fore, her wings preened and her head high.

The Fallen smiled. She was so nervous that she was shivering.

"_Hey,_" He whispered in passing as he went back to the crowd. "_you're a soldier, crowds are the least dangerous thing you've encountered._"

That actually got Morinth's spirits up, she smiled, bowing her head to hide the flush as the human scurried between some Moles, kneeling down and waiting for her to start.

Morinth breathed, and looked around, opening her mouth to speak-

"_Morri-poo!_" Taliopia's call echoed across the village. The medic appeared inside the crowd, a pair of struggling dragonflies caught in the crook of her forepaw as she waved at Morinth. "_Woooo! I'm your number one fan!_"

"I love you, dearie." Morinth chuckled, reaffirming her focus to the crowd. "…Cheeky that, all that time in the academy, with courses on public speaking, and I still have this ole' tremor in my wings. Fancy that, right?"

Some chuckles rung out. Morinth swallowed and looked back at the Fallen, and then Taliopia.

"…I know so few of you passionately. Most of us have been sort of thrown together these last few days whether by the workings of fate, or chance, or maybe even a little outside influence…" A grin in the Fallen's direction. "But even so, I'd like to share something with you, _my_ passion, to bear my heart literally for your judgment, in the hopes of a fantastic end to the evening. I have a song in mind, one mam', in the rear row there, might be familiar with."

Ignitia stood taller and smiled at Morinth.

One more glance at the Fallen. He gave her a nod.

_Just go with the flow._

Morinth slapped her chops, cricked her neck and flexed her wings, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. Her voice crept into a single note, emerging into the evening like a ghost drifting between the trees.

As the first words began to take shape, Moles, dragonflies, dragons and one human all listening, Ignitia was the one who was most impacted, and the quickest to be.

The Cant of Flight, the song for dragons who went off to war for glory.

_Our brave children_

_Caught in bronze starlight_

_Masked in shadow_

_Off in the wind_

_Eyes of eternal light, forever gazing westward_

_For the gold in our souls, whispered in the night_

_Temper thy heart and remember_

_The winds come at the rise of winter_

_We shed that which we love for good_

_Our brave children, whisked into the wind_

_Wings high and heads taller_

_Blood upon the seas_

_We search our souls for the answers we know_

_That our brave children are always home_

…Upon the third iteration, Morinth fell silent, and the night was serene like that for a long while.

Then the applause started, first among the Moles, then the dragonflies. It became riotous when Spyra whistled through her talons and Taliopia dropped all her dragonflies, ran out and tackled Morinth in a wing-hug, kissing her full on snout to snout.

The Fallen pumped a fist and clapped too, joining the noise.

Helping out did feel good every now and then.

But he hadn't been lying to Morinth earlier.

Which reminded him…

Carefully, making sure Morinth saw him clapping before Taliopia kissed her again, he slipped through the gathering. The Fallen snagged a leftover salamander steak from a platter and some apples in a passing movement at the banquet row. He stepped around the dark back of a thicket home and crossed a clearing of trees at the edges of the torchlight.

The dragonfly sentries had- of course –wandered closer to the village to listen to the song, and were now fully absorbed by their kindred. The Fallen even picked out Torrdonal madly clapping, Corrinthol pouting right next to him.

"-_Mozzletoffff-!_" Palmet screeched, before tripping over a basket and nose-diving into a pile of little dragonfly buckets with a hideous crash. The applause was mixed with jeers and laughs.

All the better.

The Fallen slipped into the dark archway of the abandoned thicket, taking in the very silent, eerie atmosphere inside. The noise of the village was dim, even though the arch was open and bare.

A pair of unblinking, white eyes glared at him in the dark. Just in the right angle, a sliver of blue moonlight cascaded into the center of the cell, and it was through this that Cynder's beak-like snout slowly fleshed itself out in full revelation.

* * *

**_{Halo Wars OST: Flollo}_**

* * *

The black dragoness grinned, and her tail started jerking against the rope restraining it.

"I figured you would come." Cynder said. "Which is very good, because I can sense the tension only created by a desperate need for _talking._ Yes, Fallen, we need to talk, and _desperately._"

"We'll get to that." The Fallen sighed, holding out the platter he'd nabbed. "Just in case you were hungry."

"A gift~?" Cynder breathed, her eyes impossibly glowing more in the dark than they already were. She eagerly shimmied her tied-up form to the edge of the palette as he crossed the cell, and put the platter down in front of her before kneeling behind it. "…How _exquisite._ Courtship should be proper, even between such radically different species. I assume you have a rudimentary knowledge of our kind? It is… _eager_ of a male to bring a female parcels for her appetite or hoard…"

"You could call what I know rudimentary." He shrugged, slipping one of his stolen Ape blades off his hip. Cynder eyed him with the most intense interest he'd ever seen as he stepped over to her.

"…What is this I see?" Cynder purred, eyes darting between the steel and his face. "Having second thoughts? Or this all part of the coaxing of our situation into something much more intense?"

"Neither." He slipped the blade through the tethers on her wrists, and snapped one of the lines free, allowing her forepaws some degree of wiggle room. "Unless you plan on eating out of that platter like a dog."

Cynder trembled as he stepped back and took his seat again. She was slow to react- which was uncharacteristic, given the astonishing speed she'd demonstrated in battle with him –and wriggled her sore wrists around before flexing her front limbs.

Of course, she tried to boast her breast to him with the movement, and he did not shy from staring.

"I was designed to be an embodiment of envy." Cynder said very quietly, reaching forward with both paws to tenderly clasp an apple. "What I do, the words I speak, and how I appear, are all weapons that have been honed since my hatching. Do you know what that means?"

"It means you sure are desperate to talk." He creased a lip.

"_Talk._" Cynder parroted, twirling the apple in her talons absentmindedly. She looked considerate as she examined the little thing, and he admitted that seeing her normally scowling face laxed into such a studious expression was quite jarring. "Yes, there is much talk, talk needed, talk unspoken. I have questions…"

"So do I."

"…Maybe we should make a _game_ out of it. What say you? Winner takes precedence _first,_ and will receive all their answers before indulging the other." Cynder's eyes flared covetously at him, her serpentine tongue licking about the apple like it was a lollipop. "…I already have one of my answers…"

"Which one is that?" He shifted on the floor.

"My form drives you _crazy._" She twirled her tongue about the apple and slurped the whole fruit into her break, crunching it quietly in the dark, watching him examine every curve and batch of fat she had. She boasted her breast more and moved her hips. "But as I already said, it was _designed_ to do that. At least some things work the way they should."

"Yes." The Fallen sheathed his blade. "Some things."

"All of your friends and allies seem quite preoccupied outside, which is very good. Was that the Cant of Flight that I heard that half-breed singing? She does have a marvelous voice, so much talent to bleed from her at will, I can deduce. You encouraged her?"

"I might've nudged it a little." He nodded. "…_So,_ uhm… chatting with the enemy."

"_Fallen,_ I am not your enemy." Cynder purred, and all the ropes tethering her body snapped free at once, flailing briefly and discarding themselves around the pallet like dead, thin snakes. The black dragoness stood and stretched out all her limbs and wings as best as the cramped cell let her. "I want you to think of me more as a _Deuteragonist,_ pulling strings always for others."

"Is that what Malefora corrupted you to do?" The Fallen darkly watched as Cynder stepped off the pallet, her gunmetal body gleaming in the moonlight as she twisted about and displayed herself for him. "To manipulate and in turn be manipulated?"

"It's a symbiotic relationship on the best of days and a necessity more commonly." Cynder sighed, casting a dismissive glare to the center of her back. "_Tsk,_ that old crone really _has_ let herself go, her magic is drying up like a carp left in the sun."

She uttered a canting word and the burning sigil emblazoned on her scales vanished in a purple wink of light. Cynder flexed her hips and sighed happily.

"_Much_ less stuffy now. Very good." She turned an eye back on the human, who was not keeping silent. "…Right, an unspoken truce?"

"You've got it."

"For the pursuit of knowledge…?" Cynder intoned, carefully laying herself on the opposite side of the platter, her tail-blade giving off a keening **_rring-! _**–as she pushed the pallet away from her and into the bramble wall.

"Uh-huh."

"_Excellent,_ why don't you start first?" Cynder plucked the second apple off the platter and crunched half of it in one bite, her normally battle-ready expression keened and overridden by a pleasant sort of smile as she chewed. She was looking right him, making lighthearted conversation.

_Damn_ this dragoness was scary as shit. He didn't know whether to get a terror-fueled erection or to piss his own pants like some kind of on—the-spot-converted exhibitionist.

Maybe a combination of the two.

Cynder swallowed and stuffed the other half in her mouth, wriggling her wicked talons free of crumbs as she waited for him.

"Speak, human, I'm quite elated to finally have a civil conversation with you." She said. "No Warfangian champion would admit it, but I see the dark looks of guilt upon males' faces. I am _coveted._ If treason were not at risk, and my standards nonexistent, I could have any champion of the north I wanted in but a heartbeat. But I'm forgetting all of that…"

She picked up the steak and bit it in half, chewing silently as she leaned over the platter and placed her snout just before his lips.

"…I want to hear what _you_ could offer me instead." She whispered.

"Starting first? That's about the best I got for you at the moment." He reached up and glanced a thumb over her lower chop. Cynder shuddered and took her neck back from him.

"Yes." She said haughtily. "But do remember, that this must be kept within the night's limits. Neither of us have the ability to see through each of our faction's threats to completion."

Cynder of course did not specify _why_ that was. Perhaps she was assuming he would garner the answer just as she had for herself.

Though she might also just not care.

Still, he had to mull on it. Cynder patiently waited on her side of the dragonfly platter, munching away at the little bits of food, her eyes never leaving him.

Where did he start?

"You've been magically altered, with shadow mutation mixed with… something else." The Fallen's eyes swam over her. "…Right?"

"Correct." Cynder mused. "I was just about to wonder aloud if that was a question. Tell me, if I had answered _no_ would that have changed anything?"

"It might've made me feel a little less sad for you."

Cynder bristled, swallowing the building rage in light of other, more potent interests.

"…Be that as it may: I am what I am. A living weapon, designed from the egg to serve my Mistress, of which I have done well for the last twenty-five years."

"That's how long it's been for you?"

"Indeed. War sees fit to never leave a day dull." She huffed, flexing her mighty wings. This brief slippage to something glum turned the moment she smiled again. "…This is very exciting. My exposure to competent conversation is, as you can imagine given my station, very _rare_ and cherished. My Mistress is not one for much discussion, and Visigoth is a dimwitted old man whose glory days have abandoned him."

"Visigoth… hairy guy? Really big? Two axes and nasty disposition?" The Fallen held his fists up to demonstrate.

Cynder surprised him with a tiny _giggle,_ this sort of squeak of laughter. She touched her mouth with a talon and hopped her shoulders.

Her face shifted in front of him again, making him jump in the seat of his pants.

The transformations done by the mutation… what had Malefora done to this dragon?

"An apt description. Yes, that sounds exactly like him." Cynder put her chin in her palm, utterly fixated on him. "He is the one who plucked my egg from the temple's collection, upon request by my Mistress. He is also the one who underwent the ritual to transform me into her child as I currently am."

"Do you…love him?"

"_Visigoth?_" Cynder flinched, an uncertain grin spreading down her snout. "Obviously you're joking. _Oh,_ or do you speak of a paternal suggestion? I'd humor the latter but: _no._ I loathe him, truthfully, for how he challenges my throne and decided for me my current state of affairs."

"So you hate him?"

"Hate might be a strong word…. But it is also an accurate one, depending on who you ask."

"What would you say if I told you that I killed him?" The Fallen asked.

Cynder's smile dampened but still remained. There was a long pause after he had spoken, the black dragoness utterly unreadable for a good and long minute.

Cynder suddenly slipped back into casual action, adjusting her position on the floor, wiping away the now empty platter, and tapping her talons on the dirt.

"_Good riddance._" She muttered. "Perhaps it is the shock of the moment, but I feel little about this development. Things have already gotten as worse as they can be, and I have spent the long trek here contemplating my failure and trying to accept it. Creatively speaking, I fully admit to a fellow intellectual like you that I struggle to adhere to my own preaching. But understand this: Visigoth is-" She paused. "-_was_ a lynchpin and mediator between the collective ego of his Apes and the true hand of direction giving them purpose. Apes are simple-minded barbarians. They esteem other Apes above each other and rely on a hierarchy in order to keep their definition of _peace._ Such a machine runs on parts granted a coin a dozen. Visigoth was not irreplaceable, at least not in entirety."

"And there's three of them left? These Chieftains?"

"Nownow, Fallen, I stay here for you and me, not to divulge information for the war effort…" Cynder annoyed him by wagging a paw finger.

"Okay…" He thought for a second, Cynder watching him eagerly yet still. Outside, the crowd's racket was dying down a bit. Cynder noticed, and her wings sagged.

"How unfortunate that this is coming to a close so quickly." She sighed.

"Don't worry about them, I have that under control, you have as long as you need." The Fallen brushed a hand at her. Cynder blinked, flattery spreading through her chest.

"Much obliged." She breathed.

"How are you able to master so many elements like Spyra?" He asked. "I've noticed when you were trying to kill us-"

" -_Her! _I was… only trying to kill _her._" Cynder quietly objected, looking embarrassed.

"-_okay,_ so I've noticed while you were trying to kill _Spyra_ that you have a multitude of breath weapons. Green icicles, wind currents and pure terror? The shadow fire too."

"Poison, Wind, Fear and _Shadow._" Cynder said each one like it was a separate delicacy to be consumed on a queen's table. She described her powers like sweetmeats or pastries of only the finest import. It both fascinated and disturbed him. "Malefora knew I would need the variety to deal with the Northerners. She gave me just a touch of her own purple ancestry so that I may more easily adapt to elements outside the four known to most dragons."

"So Malefora was the first purple dragon?"

"Of course she was, any sage worth her salt knows that…" Cynder smirked. "Her desire to reshape things fairly drove her into rebellion against her kin. It is the same thing that drives me."

"Because you like hurting people." He said.

"_Hmmph~._" Cynder giggled. "How touching. _Not entirely,_ though I'm afraid that the act of killing has provided a certain _rush_ throughout my life."

"For me too."

"…To see the life seep from someone who so strongly opposed your view that they were willing to risk themselves to take you down." She heavenly mused. "Spyra must know that feeling too. She did kill so many of my men. But anyway, _no_ I do not fight for Malefora out of some primitive need for homicide. I fight for her to change the organization of our world. It is exclusionary, it is minute, and the dragons and Moles have all become small-minded and self-serving. The Dark Army would see everything erased as to create a clean slate, so that the world may be remade."

"With Malefora at its head." The Fallen darkly stated. "You're fighting for an ego-maniac and a murderer."

"There's a lot alike between you and her." Cynder scooted closer to him on the floor, bowing her snout as to only be from his nose by a few inches. He smelled her minty breath as she spoke. "…Normally, this is the part where you outright deny this, as the hero."

"I'm not a hero and it would be untruthful of me to deny it." He said flatly. "Your views don't necessarily diverge from mine. It's your methods I can't deal with. Reform can happen, even if it needs to be done against people's wills in the interest of a greater good. That needs to be done without mass murder, at least of non-combatants."

"Who could wage such a war!" Cynder roared laughter. "As to eliminate _collateral?_ You're more lofty-minded than I thought."

"Call my standards higher." He shrugged.

"Agreeing to disagree." Cynder dismissed. "Ask me something else."

"Haven't you wondered who you might have been if you had actually been allowed to live a normal life? From egg to young adulthood?"

Cynder mulled over this.

"…What might have been," She carefully said. "is never part of _what comes next._ Doting in the past is frivolous and stupid. Do you wish for times past? Rolling in your nest at night asking what you could have done differently? Shaming yourself for past inactions and wrong choices?"

"Every night of my life." The Fallen nodded. "Look in my eyes and tell me that you see nothing but ignorance. I dare you."

"No, not _ignorance_ surely…" Cynder scooted even closer, until her forepaws were resting over his legs, and her snout was in his face.

The black dragoness began to develop a minute rumble in her breast as she kneaded her wicked talons into the jumpsuit sleeves over his thighs, and brushed the tip of her hard, warm beak across his nose and lips. Her white eyes were staring deeply into him, unblinking in the dark of the thicket cell.

"…I can pick apart much pain inside of you. Anguish, a pinch of angst, self-loathing and an astounding amount of destructive energy directed back at your own mind." Cynder whispered. "I see a lot of these things, and a heavy dollop of _lust._"

The Fallen growled and pressed his lips into the tip of her snout, flexing his mandible. Cynder gave a tiny, muffled moan and leaned into the link, one of her paws sliding up his thigh, making him shiver as her metal-sharp talons grazed across his sensitive flesh. She cupped his groin and squeezed her pads, feeling around for the twitching organ inside his jumpsuit.

"You seem much more eager for the _future_." She uttered, wetly disconnecting from him, her eyes hungrily darting to his lap. "…Your species has a tendency for _clothes_ as do cheetahs. It's no wonder the cat-folk's own women are such hateful creatures, and their men spiteful."

"…Cheetahs?" The Fallen huffed, his hands gliding down her soft, scaly neck. "Where are they?"

"_I _want to ask some questions." Cynder giggled, giving his crotch a squeeze and making him grunt. "We'll deal with _this_ later…"

The Fallen's heart leaped into his throat.

_Dragoness, _his mind pulsed. The perfumy scent of draconic arousal was now stabbing him in the cerebral cortex like a deranged murderer.

"_Mmmyes…~_" Cynder licked her fangs, bumping her chest in between his legs and pressing the length of her beak into the bridge of his nose. Her paws hooked his narrow hips and pulled him into her. "…But first…"

"_-H-Hnhh-?_" He drunkenly kissed her nose.

"Surely you have hobbies." Cynder demonstrated unbelievable resolve when she immediately tore away from him and left him cold and very blue balled.

His arms were still hovering where they had come to rest on her shoulders. The Fallen looked shocked as Cynder lounged on the floor where she was earlier and grinned at him.

"Tell me of them." She chirped. "Our flesh can wait."

"…b-but-" He found himself stammering like a child denied a cookie.

"It c-can wait." Cynder growled with more force in her tone, her expression briefly turning dark. She rubbed her breast tenderly and huffed. "_Speak._"

"…._right._" He coughed, sheepishly trying to cover himself with his legs. "…Hobbies? Maybe at one time, there used to be, but I can't exactly pursue a lot of them anymore. There's no time."

"This is because of your ability to jump worlds?"

"Yeah."

"How many worlds have you been to?"

"Hundreds."

"_Really._" Cynder breathed, her chin back in her palms as her tail thudded behind her. "How many of them have possessed beings such as myself? I've overheard some of the mutterings of your Wing outside, and they say that you have said that dragons are common outside of this realm."

"They exist, I don't know if they're _common._" He tried. "But you bunch aren't a unique thing, I'll tell you that much."

"And your magical capabilities? How did you learn them?"

"I don't know any magic." He blinked.

"What? B-But your touch…" Cynder reached out a paw, shivering when he ran his palm over its back, desperately seeking out to have the black dragoness pressed against his body again. "_…Electrifying. _That isn't natural, there is some kind of enchantment you have inside of you that impacts dragons, specifically _hens_."

_I've just got style- _he almost said as a quote from Spyra. But something told him Cynder wouldn't be too happy having the purple beastess brought back into the conversation.

"I can't explain that to you." He shrugged.

"Can't or won't?"

"_Can't._ It's always just been that way."

"Interesting…" Cynder drummed her claws. "I'm a writer. What about you?"

"I've dabbled." He shrugged again. "Is that what some of the papers Ignitia collected are?"

"Yes, the Guardian absconded with many notes and entries I had penned in Forlorn. Luckily, the majority of my craft is sealed away back home…" Cynder smiled. "I'm certain you've been told about Concurrent Skies."

"Your castle." He nodded. "It's apparently a pretty dark place."

"If you love sunshine it will not be your cup of tea." Cynder hummed. "But it is secluded, and the architecture speaks with my inner muse."

"I've never shied from Gothic, but I prefer cleaner cut and brighter, usually a mix."

"Indeed?" Cynder's eyes lit up with genuine interest. She felt a brief glaze of cold before a settling warmth that sloshed in her body. It wasn't a feeling of arousal, but something more… _social._ She couldn't remember a conversation that she'd had with anyone on such a personal level.

After all, how often was someone willing to listen to the Terror of the Skies, purely to just _listen?_

Nobody had ever cared to know her before.

Surging with hope, Cynder scooted back into his space and rested her paws on his ankles, rubbing them idly as she cast her horns back and smiled, searching the ceiling for her next sentence.

"…So let me ask you this then… What do you know about weaving and stoneworking? I fancy interior design of all things…"

* * *

{🐉}

Ignitia was flipping through one of the books she'd recovered, only half-reading every stanza she grazed over. Her mind was swirling around so fast that words were difficult to absorb right now.

It was an original copy of the Darkseep Tome, a black book written long ago by unknown authors claiming to be survivors of the disaster that had befallen ancient Stormwatch. There were sages across the Dragon Realms willing to risk their lives to get their claws on it.

Returning it to Warfang would allow the scribes ample material to release updated editions. Maybe Ignitia could make that market just a little less fierce.

But awakened knowledge, ancient pacts and forgotten sayings aside… Spyra's words earlier…

"Wingleader?" She startled when Harad appeared just behind her, his eyes brimmed with a bit of surprise as he observed the clutter of papers around her forepaws and her open hipsash bag. "I hope I'm not interrupting something."

"_No,_ not at all, Captain." Ignitia quickly shut the book and started gathering all the sheets up to stuff them back in the bag.

"A moment of your time then, ma'am?"

"Certainly."

"We need to decide who is to be the runner for our return to Warfang." Harad stepped closer, subtly nodding for the gathering of Moles in the center of the village. "I think you'd agree with me that leaving without someone to watch our new flock would prove most irresponsible."

"Indeed, we need to organize for transport for the records, the prisoners, and the Fallen." Ignitia sounded strange after the last bit. Harad ground his fangs but did little else to signify any impact.

"I volunteer myself, alone." He stated. "The Wing will be under your command in my absence, and I shall return with aid."

"You fly clear skies, Captain." Ignitia stood up and rolled her hipsash over. "The entirety of Visigoth's tribe was slaughtered inside the tower, along with the Chieftain himself. Why, even Jute and his entire flight of Dreadwings couldn't have survived…"

"While Dark occupation of the south may be lifted, they still control the bogs north of the geyser fields, Tall Plains and Monkano Island. The Frontier Sea is still dangerous." Harad reminded. "I'll make preparations to leave early in the morning."

"Fly swiftly, Captain." Ignitia smiled. "I think tomorrow I will lead an expedition back to the ruins of the tower to sift through the wreckage, perhaps uncover any other secrets Cynder and Visigoth had been hiding."

"What of the pool?" Harad asked. "Can the Dark One still use it? Or do you think it was smashed when Forlorn's chute collapsed?"

"Either-or could have occurred." Ignitia shrugged. "I think right now, though, what is more important is _rest._ Lay low, Captain, just for tonight, and I consider that an order."

"Yes, ma'am." Harad didn't look any less stern as usual. "And a request?"

"Yes?"

"I want to act as standing sentry for the Cloud Ripper." Harad muttered. "These insects have kind hearts but are weak. We can't rely on them to watch for her trickery."

"Corrinthol and Torrdonal and myself were all to gather around the thicket soon." Ignitia said. "You may join us as well. It's all auxiliary, really, because that seal I put on Cynder should hold her in addition to the ropes."

"She is weaker than I expected, perhaps age has caught up with her." Harad chuckled. "The Fallen really did strike a great blow to the enemy today, I begrudgingly give him that."

"_Hey! _Who wants to see me chug amber-beer until it comes out my nose?" Spyra shouted nearby, earning whoops from several dragonflies and her brother.

"…I can't believe Spyra is the result of generations of prophecies." Harad huffed. "She is practically an infant, fresh from the shell."

"She's smarter than you think." Ignitia frowned at him. "Let me get her to the academy, and put her in the elemental training ring. Me and my sisters will shape her into something even you could never frown upon."

"I hope you're right." He sighed. "…Will Guardian Terradora be present to see her?"

"I imagine she would, once word begins to spread that the Purple Dragoness has been recovered." Ignitia smiled wryly. "Remember who she is and what she practices, Harad."

"It was merely a professional curiosity," Harad said blandly, his eyes suddenly locking on the spectacle that Spyra was centered in. "…Ancestors, is it natural for a dragon to be able to drink that much?"

* * *

{🐉}

"…that was when I had enough. I turned around, and I saw this guy sitting at the bar-"

"-This _bar_ you speak of, is like a tavern?"

"It's similar. Anyway, he was drinking, and he was muttering about my client, right out in the open, with no attempt to hide anything." The Fallen shook his head. "Like a complete idiot, he sold himself right in front of me."

"So what did you do?" Cynder asked, wide-eyed.

"I put his head through the counter." The Fallen made a gripping motion and brought his hand down, making a '_cshhh!'_ –noise under his breath. Cynder chortled loudly. "All I had to do was drag him outside and throw him in the back of the truck. Easy payout."

"Fascinating." She tapped her talons on his leg. "So many words unheard of here… _bars, trucks, guns…?_ These other worlds sound like they are troves of knowledge."

"They're a lot of things." He said in the pause. "…It's hard, being a portaljumper."

"Yes." Cynder huskily huffed. "_Hard._"

"...What about what you were saying before? This corruption that Malefora embued in you. You have no free will?"

"...Of course I have free will." Cynder snorted, her attention having drifted in the lull. "The mutations have grown relaxed over the years, and more and more did I start to prove capable of not only directing my own armies, but even _refusing_ Malefora's orders. She did not punish me for this but rather rewarded me with more power, and more security, lest I ever become too greedy."

"So why not kill and usurp her and become the new Dark Mistress?"

"..._Tah._" Cynder quietly laughed, looking down at her talons. "You make things sound so straightforward, Fallen. I admire your singular drive for things spoken or gained. You must be a trier."

"I am." He nodded. "...But trying to figure you out is really hard."

"_Hard,_ yes..." Cynder licked her chops, her eyes lowering.

The conversation had been taking a turn towards the end anyway, but she hadn't actually made a move until now. The Fallen felt her paw brush over his lap and center between his legs. He watched her squeeze him through the jumpsuit, hearing that thrumming purr redouble in her chest.

"…_Ah~…._" Cynder hissed, rubbing her thighs together, her tail sweeping across the floor.

"Are you okay?" He blinked, eyes swimming over her plump backside and the curve of her spine.

"…It's nothing. Continue your discussion…" Cynder eyed him quietly. "…What about these plains you speak of? These… pine-forested woods and coastal islands?" All of the body art down her face and shoulders was beginning to glow pink.

"It's all behind me now." The Fallen breathed. "Then I came here."

"…_Fascinating._" Cynder squeezed his groin again, thinking about something. "Why don't you tell me about the experience you've gathered as the mate of the purple dragoness of legend?"

"_Mate?_" He parroted. "W-Well I-"

"Don't lie to me. I knew her scorning words had truth, but now, as I breathe in your scent, I can smell it." Cynder pushed her snout into his chest, inhaling deeply and making him shiver. "I can smell _her. _She's been all over you. Her mouth, _here, here…_" Cynder's long, sinuous tongue flicked out and started to graze over every spot she mentioned, each little lick eliciting a grunt in the back of his throat.

"Her _vagina._" Cynder grumbled, eyes flickering to his for a moment as she teased the sleeve of his suit's groin with a single lick. "_Only here._ Her mouth…? Curiously absent… perhaps you two simply did not have enough time?"

"_I-It wasn't-_"

"_I _am the Terror of the Skies. I have never had to compete for something I desire. I _take_ what I want." Cynder's teeth revealed themselves, making him gasp when they hooked on the hem of his suit in a little love-nip. "…Oh, do not make me ask, _human._"

"But we're out of time-"

"_Now._" Cynder snapped, her wing blades lowering to hang just over his head. "Now, Ancestors damn you, remove this barrier from me."

The Fallen glanced at the archway of the thicket, the village still murmuring distantly outside with conversation.

"_Fallen._" Cynder whined, bumping him with her snout. "You speak of time… _so hurry up…_"

The Fallen snatched the lower half of his stomach hem and fiddled for the detachment straps. He wriggled, and Cynder growled as she roughly gripped a growing flap of black material dragging down his hips.

He jolted as she dragged the hem down to his knees and stopped, a pink, lightly haired pair of balls and a dick flopping out, the latter already hard as a diamond.

"…Non-retractable." Cynder muttered, her minty breath washing over his head as she leaned closer and tentatively reached for it with her paw. "…And grazed with just a touch of fur… Humans are so interestingly constructed…"

Cynder paused, her pads torturously close to him as she hovered over the twitching rod.

"Does she scream?"

"Who?" The Fallen blinked.

"_The purple dragon,_ does it make her scream?"

"She wasn't disappointed, if that's what you're asking."

The Terror of the Skies smiled wryly.

"Do you know how absent the Dark Army is of suitable mates?"

"Good thing I showed up and wrecked your tower." He breathed. Cynder laughed at him before snatching his dick up in her paw and giving her pads a good flex.

The Fallen grunted and his hips bucked, Cynder coyly eyeing him as she gave his spear a few experimental pumps.

"…She must gush over it, but has she really _played_ with it?" Cynder tormented him, grazing two of her talons through the pubic hair ringing his balls. She took glee in watching him twitch, seeing the organs roll up instinctively from the sharp cold of her claws. "Speak, human, tell me what you want."

He murmured something, his hands reaching over and cupping her wrists.

"I couldn't understand." Cynder purred. "What?"

"…_my…_"

"_What? _Say it louder, please."

"Suck my dick." He grunted, eyes snatching shut as her pumps increased in volume. Cynder whined lowly and wrung her thighs tightly together as she felt herself leak.

"…You _did_ destroy my tower…" The black dragon whispered. "…_but,_ you did also save my life… I suppose the latter deserves some kind of compensation…"

Cynder opened her mouth, and her tongue flicked over his head. The Fallen's hands grabbed two of her larger horns and tugged, the Cloud Ripper giving a muffled, singsong moan as her chops parted, and her tongue started to slowly snake down the underside of his mast.

It coiled to the base and began to circulate in tight rings until almost his entire length was sheathed in a wet, slippery sleave. Dragon gob ran down his balls and pattered onto the floor, Cynder rattling his whole body as a followup moan sent vibrations coursing through his hips.

The Fallen was beside himself as he leaned back and worked Cynder by her horned crest, grunting as wet slaps echoed out from her working tongue and chops. Cynder suckled on him tenderly, keeping her fangs wide and her tongue active, moving it completely down and up in a repeated cycle. It felt like his penis was being thrust into some kind of flesh vortex lubed with draconic spit.

"…No wonder you're so good at twisters…" The Fallen chuckled. "…You can do it outside _and_ inside."

Cynder surprised him with a deep gag as she sunk the tip of her snout into his groin and her jaw to his sack. He groaned as his dragon-conquerer was pinned completely inside the tongue-slapped interior of her beak, quivering under the attentions of her throaty hums.

Physical limitations meant that he couldn't fill her entire snout, but Cynder was in no state to complain. He certainly wasn't small, and his taste was an interesting mix of saltiness and masculine tint. He leaked little beads of pre that she eagerly sucked up in the vortex her tongue was making and swallowed.

The Fallen shoved her horns down and humped into her beak, his motions giving off subdued, but present squelches as Cynder's saliva ran down to the floor and dripped from her chin, rendered silver and glinting from the moonlight peaking in through the thicket's arch.

"_Slow down._" He muttered, groaning when Cynder did the exact opposite and started to speed up. "-_wait, don't make it s-so quick…_"

Cynder silenced him by doubling her efforts, her eyes lidding half-shut as she gripped the base of his slathered rod and started to bob her long, regal neck. His creamy meat slipped in and out through the crimson-colored tornado of her serpentine tongue, reams of gob now dripping down her wrist and the silver cuff capping it. Cynder rumbled and hiked her backside in the air, displaying herself for him as she battled his restraint in an effort to finish him off.

The Fallen couldn't see straight as wet slaps, muffled gasps for air and pained dragon moans meshed with the consistent purr building in her breast. There was a heavy **_thwmp thwmp thwmp… _**-as Cynder's tail smacked against every surface making the cell behind her in its efforts to whip and curl.

"…_Cynder…_" The Fallen gave in, defeatedly calling her name as the black dragoness went down on him harshly and rapidly.

Cynder shivered as his words stabbed her right in the belly. She jammed his meat inside her mouth at a proper angle and gagged loudly, dragon spit spattering his groin and thighs in a pronounced, and moist singular burst.

His hips left the floor as one of her paws slipped under his butt and cupped over his cheeks, lifting him to aid in his drive to face fuck her.

The Fallen then started to grunt with each wet impact of her snout hitting his pubes. Cynder purred louder and pinched an eye open to watch him with delight as she did her work.

"-_Cyn-der-_" He growled. "…_I-I'm…_"

Cynder let him quickly slip out of her tongue's grasp and from her beak. He gasped as cold air entreated his blade in the blink of an eye. Cynder followed through and gripped him with both paws, nudging the corner of her snout across its side to lick up and down like it was a dogbone.

She egged him on with lurid little moans of intrigue and wet noises from all her lapping and kisses. The Fallen cast his head back and humped through the ring of her paws and against her beak, her own saliva and his pre glistening as they stained her scales and subdued the glow of whatever runic art they touched on her cheek.

…_So close…_

The Fallen couldn't keep it contained any longer. He was on a precipice that was taking its sweet, torturous time in reaching him. His humps became fevered and his breath ragged. Cynder kept pumping and licking, her eyes wide and pleading in the dark.

With one last thrust, the Fallen exhaled and a white ream of semen shot out and into the air. It draped like a silver ribbon over Cynder's snout, its tailend slapping wetly just below her eye, which she instinctively closed.

The black dragoness moaned as his musk filled her nose and ream after ream of cum latched onto her beak, her cheeks and her forehead. Some of it shot straightly up and cascaded over her wrists, and more of it simply bubbled out like lava erupting from a volcano. Rivers seeped and meshed with all of her saliva, a hearty mess developing in a series of puddles on the floor underneath them whilst the Cloud Ripper pleasured him.

She kept squeezing as she lapped up everything she could, coaxing a few last pathetic droplets and a squirt from him before the Fallen gasped and draped on the cool ground, exhausted, and utterly ball-drained.

"…_Good god…_" He panted, watching her as she cleaned him from base to tip, and went over everything for secondary licks, his gradually dying erection flopping among her motions and slapping against her nose. "…_Maybe I chose the wrong side…_"

"…_Mmmmm~, maybe…_" Cynder moaned, giving a last few twirls of her licker over his crown, before giggling and slipping her paws from him, she leaned back and brought up her talons to her mouth to clean them too while also working at the cum ribbons across her face.

Her tongue was really long...

"…No matter what Spyra says, you are_ my human,_ mine and mine only."

"…If agreeing with that gets me more head, then _sure,_ whatever you say, baby…" The Fallen weakly pumped a fist in the air.

"_Hmmph,_ males…" Cynder smiled, rolling her eyes as she worked on her last nail. "You're so easy to please. Play with their cocks, embellish their egos, and treat them with gifts of food… You can almost guarantee loyalty."

"…L-Let me do you too…" He tried to sit up, Cynder's eyes locking onto him as he fumbled onto his knees, his expended dick swinging underneath him. "It's been a while since I've had some nice derg-puss to eat."

Cynder rumbled and started to lean back as he crawled over to her.

"…When I told you what I did in Forlorn," She whispered as the Fallen straddled over her waist, his palms rubbing down her shapely inner thighs as he spread the large dragoness on the floor. "that she says _yes?_ Fallen… I mean it… she says _yes,_ yes… so much so yes…"

Cynder gasped and her wings twitched when he met her nose to nose and kissed her on the snout.

"…You know what I'm going to do tonight…" She said.

"I know." He started moving down to her chest, kissing the rotund, crimson length as he went.

"…Let me take you with me." Cynder pleaded. "_Ride with me,_ human… To Concurrent Skies. I will bring us to paradise. You, and me, secluded from all else and everything. The Blue Hurricane is impenetrable, only _I _know how to get through it. I will abandon Malefora, and we will make our nest in my castle, _our_ den."

The Fallen dreaded when opportunities like these came, and they always did when he got involved with the natives.

Happened _Every. Single. Time._

He had spoken with more logic when he'd first come down, and less morality. A few fights here, some sex sprinkled in there, and his whole perspective had been warped.

"I can't." He muttered, feeling Cynder's plush body go stiff at the muscles. He expected her to lash out, or berate him, she _was, after all,_ a poetically abrasive dragoness.

"…_why?_" Cynder whispered, burying her snout in his hair. She suddenly laughed, muffled in his scalp, her forepaws linked over his back, and her tail carefully coiled over his ankle and constricted. "-_Oh, why? Just tell me why. I believe you. But tell me why._"

"Because to get back to where I came from, I have to beat Malefora." The Fallen told her.

"I didn't ask you to pick a side." Cynder's voice cracked. "I asked you to pick _me._"

"I know." He shut his eyes.

"…_Yo…! Where my human at…?_"

It was Spyra, calling out to him in the night outside. There was murmuring around her intermittent shouts. She had others with her. He could pick out Morinth, Taliopia and Firefly…

"You don't have to leave." He told her.

"I do." Cynder swallowed, her eyes becoming puffy as she stared at the thicket arch with dread. Her longing gaze locked onto him, perched on her curvy belly. Cynder made a distressed sound and embraced him with all her limbs and her wings, squeezing him like a comfort blanket. "I'm going to find you when this war ends."

"Not if I find you first."

Cynder kissed him, wrapping her tail around his ribcage to carefully lift and deposit him from her.

"I actually am sorry." Cynder winced, white light building in her throat, causing a slight draft in the thicket. "But it should at least look convincing."

"My lips are sealed." He said, cringing as Cynder's Wind element began to ramp up in a staccato howl. "Just go easy, would you? I had a rough day."

"Noted. And Fallen," Cynder stood to her full height, spreading her wings into the thicket's bramble roof. Roots snapped and wood started to chip, the very structure moaning around her. "_thankyou._" –She whispered.

**_Fwoooshh~! _**–the Fallen was airborne, cast like a discarded tissue on a hurricane's breeze.

He hit the ground squarely on his back a distance off, grunting.

"-_Fallen?_" Spyra cried, her voice getting closer as she and the other dragons bounded over. "What happened?"

The Fallen scrambled to pull up the lower hem of his jumpsuit as Spyra, Morinth and Taliopia all gathered around him.

"-_Oh!_" Taliopia gasped, shielding her eyes with a wing, and then peaking when she thought no one was looking.

"My my, cheeky that," Morinth didn't even bother. She just grinned. "at least I know what aliens look like now."

"The fuck are your pants down for, dude?" Spyra took his shoulder sleeve in her teeth and helped him to his feet.

"Well-" The Fallen started to say.

Then the thicket where they were keeping Cynder exploded.

There was a flash of blood-red light, and the unnatural screech of a monstrous, but feminine beast. Chunks of the abandoned structure whipped in all directions, and a cloud of dust plumed from the iris of the burst. They all could hear some people screaming in the village behind them.

Cynder was rising towards the woodland canopy, spinning on her axis gracefully as her wings spread and caught her in the updraft. For a moment she was a hellish sight, a black, pale-eyed dragoness whose underside was shaded crimson from the blaring magical light still pulsing where the thicket had once been.

The Fallen was the only one not hollering about to prepare for battle. He met eyes with Cynder across the distance, his face riddled with sadness.

Cynder could be heard making a chuffing noise, her gaze locking onto the Fallen's feet, and hatefully narrowing at Spyra who was standing just beside him.

Her wings flapped, and thunder struck. A sonic boom wriggled through the air and Cynder shot through the trees like a bullet. Nobody needed to see her past that point to know it was all over.

"What happened?" Captain Harad tucked his wings and landed in front of the steaming wreckage of the thicket. "The ward! There was supposed to be a magical ward entrapping Cynder!"

"…Fallen?" Spyra stared at the debris and then looked at him.

"…She got out." The human stammered.

"_No!_" Ignitia shrieked, bounding up to the exchange and screeching to a halt besides Morinth and Taliopia, her amber eyes wide and burning with panic. "She broke through the ward! She-"

Ignitia's jaw flapped.

"-_I-I have failed all of you…_" She muttered.

Harad opened his mouth to speak, but apparently discovered that he could not. Little embers continued to rain down through the dark night as the last of Cynder's exit strategy dissolved to nothingness. Where the thicket had once stood, was now a blackened skidmark with a few stumps of the bramble's foundation sticking from it like ribs.

"…That's not good, right?" Firefly hovered by Spyra's horn. "_That_ was Cynder? And she's your new nemesis?"

"That bitch." Spyra snapped. "I used to play in that old thicket when I was a hatchling!"

"…You know where she's going." The Fallen spoke up, guilt bleeding into his veins. He couldn't have stopped her from leaving anyway, but… he hadn't exactly _tried. _"Her fortress in Concurrent Skies."

"And how would you know _that?_" Harad growled, turning from the blast mark and snarling at him.

"She said so before she broke the ceiling."

"What about Monkano? Or the Dark Continent itself? Cynder could be limping back to her master right as we speak." Harad rebuked. "Malefora isn't going to simply liquidate a living weapon like her even after such a failure."

"We can't chase her." Morinth eyed the pitch-black sky. "That slippery hen is long gone."

"So… you're saying we're fucked?" Spyra sneered.

"Cynder is one of the fastest flying dragons who has ever lived." Harad darkly explained. "It's where she earns her title: _Terror of the Skies? _Her wings create a sonic scream when she dives, it can be heard for miles. I've only heard it once before, years ago."

"We're fucked." Spyra grunted, kicking a scorched stick.

"This must be like a passing weekday for you people, right? Right?" Firefly tried to joke. Nobody laughed.

* * *

{🐉}


	23. Chapter 22 - Long Day

**Dragon(s)layer **

**22**

* * *

**Long Day**

* * *

What had initially started out as a celebration had turned into something a little more somber. The dragonflies were rattled worst from the first real display of violence they had ever witnessed. Cynder's destructive escape had shocked them so badly, that many refused to come out of their little homes the following morning.

Moles that had been sharing thickets tried to coax their generous hosts outside to bid them farewell, but seldom few were actually heeded.

Ignitia hated the feeling of dread that had fallen on the cute little bramble village. The insects were so innocent, tiny and delicate. They weren't meant for war, she knew.

Having slept in a larger, hollowed thicket, Ignitia greeted the cloudy morning with a wide yawn as she stretched her scaly limbs and flexed her wings in the crisp air. She shivered and her fins preened. The temperature had dropped by almost a quarter of yesterday's level.

The once very lively village was now eerily still as wisps of fog rose from the peat-puddles ringing the exterior fringes and recesses. It passed like ghostly tendrils around the thickets and nested over the feet of Moles as they packed their meager belongings in hushed little family units in the village center.

A few dragonflies were out handing off leaf-wrapped rations and urns of stew and amber-beer. Talking was at an all-time low, save for an odd mumble or wayward call.

Ignitia looked at the sky.

_Cynder broke my seal._

-What was she thinking? Cynder had never been restrained by the seal in the first place. It was all an act.

_To get to _him.

The Guardian narrowed her eyes as she stared at Spyra's thicket.

When Cometcu and Lightnux had spent all night begging Spyra to not leave, they had eventually passed out. Spyra had put them and her brother to bed, staying up and talking to Ignitia briefly as the latter hung her head through their little kitchen window.

"The Captain's sending ahead of us for Warfang. He'll bring back a few more Wings to transport the Moles and our non-flight-capable party members…" She was explaining.

The Fallen reclined from where he'd been digging in a nook shelf, giving her a little '_Heyo' _–before slurping at a pitcher of cranberry juice as he walked out of the kitchen and towards….

_Spyra's room._

Ignitia had felt her scales bristle and a cold, pinpricking sensation of anger flow into her blood. Right in front of her. He wasn't even being subtle. Though she supposed neither of them had outright said anything, nor planned to…

Still, Ignitia couldn't help but silently scheme about how to confront the Fallen about the '_Issue' _even if it technically wasn't any of her business…

"Ignitia?" Spyra groggily blinked at her. "Did you hear me?"

"_No,_ excuse me, say again." Ignitia hid her displeasure with her matronly, trademark smile.

"I asked what we're doin' about Forlorn."

"I'll organize a team tomorrow and we'll search the wreckage for anything we might have missed, including the corrupted pool. I wish to make sure it is destroyed before we leave for the north."

"Sounds like a plan…" Spyra rubbed her eye and yawned, sitting for a moment in the kitchen, her gaze locked on the arch frame to her room nook. "…It feels good to be home. Y'know what really sucks? Being on a bungee-chord, and slingshotting between wanting to leave for an amazing place and my destiny, and staying where I'm most familiar with things."

"Spyra, I know that what me, the Captain and the city are asking of you is difficult, but…" Ignitia sighed. "…We _need you._"

When Spyra didn't say anything, Ignitia added:

"Because we are losing."

"…Welp', we haven't lost yet." Spyra grinned. "As the saying goes: _risk it all, or bitch out._"

The Purple Dragon trotted over to her room nook and waved at Ignitia with her wing.

"G'night, Ignitia."

"Goodnight, dear." Ignitia purred warmly, her expression souring as soon as Spyra passed inside her nook.

She could hear nesting shifting before Spyra giggled in the dark, the Fallen's gruff voice whispering to her in the shadows.

….Back in the present, Ignitia was adamant now about understanding this human and to what extent his powers truly were capable of reaching.

Warfang would earn answers for all of them.

"Captain, I assume you're to be off for-" Ignitia blinked when she found Harad's thicket empty.

"You looking for the green one?" A white colored dragonfly female buzzed out of the shadows inside, holding a little quilt over her arms. She must have been Harad's host last night.

"Yes, have you seen the Captain, my lady?" Ignitia asked.

"He left before sunrise, heading that way." The dragonfly pointed through the arch. Ignitia followed her finger.

North.

Harad wasn't one to waste time, she supposed.

"You needed him for something?" The dragonfly cocked her head.

"I would've wished him luck a second time, for whatever it was worth." Ignitia trotted away to get ready to leave. She eyed the broken cabinet that some of the Moles had carried into the village as she passed, stuffed with all the records she'd saved. Whatever soldiers got stuck carrying _that_ would be grumbling the whole flight.

Nearby, Morinth was just emerging from one of the thicket homes, stretching her wings.

"-_EEyyaahhhh…~_" –She groaned, slapping her chops and itching a shoulder. Morinth sighed, snorted and then cringed. "-_Ick._ Spyra was right, it _does_ stink around here in the morning…"

"Did you say something, Morri-poo?" Taliopia drowsily wandered out of the same home, fumbling as she stuffed healing salves back into the little hip pouch she had. "And good morning."

"Morning, _lovveee~._" Morinth pecked her on the head and noticed Ignitia. "Ah! 'Ello mam'. We're ready to start operations on demand."

"Can't we have some breakfast first?" Taliopia made a sour face as the swamp-humus hit her hard. "_Eeeww…_ it smells out here…"

"It's the pollination and sporing time for most of the vegetation." Ignitia said, stopping before them. "It's also because the temperature rises from the cooler nighttime and evaporates moisture clinging to the peat bog mud, that's why you see all the fog."

"I didn't need to _see_ it to know it." Morinth pinched her nose and fanned her wings. "Just a quick up-and-up by Cynder's wrecked fortress today?"

"A brief sweep before Harad returns with aid." Ignitia nodded. "Mount your tailblades, Morinth, Tali', we don't know if anything survived the collapse yesterday. Be on your guards."

Next stop was Corrinthol and Torrdonal, both of whom were gathered around an expended campfire from last night. The fire dragon looked so dejected, that Ignitia could've easily mistaken him for being on death row.

"It isn't so bad around here, the moisture is quite pleasant." Torrdonal was saying, grooming at his back fins. "It reminds me of home. No pools of water, just warm, slightly damp air. We keep a tight schedule on atmosphere at my den."

"…_Really fantastic…_" Corrinthol groaned. "…I'm _hungry._ All that food last night wasn't even good, and the amber-beer was in _drops._ I could eat a tree right now."

"Prepare yourselves, gentledrakes, we're leaving soon." Ignitia hummed, ignoring Corrinthol's disdainful glare.

"It wasn't all that bad." Torrdonal quietly shrugged. "At least the thicket was relatively dry and without water. I slept well."

Corrinthol muttered something unintelligible and tossed a ration wrap at his fellow soldier as he trotted away.

"How fairs all of you?" Ignitia asked as she drew closer to the grouping of Moles. One of them, a little man named Frizsocket, gave her a slight bow before speaking hushedly.

"Some of the infants are sickening." He adjusted a small pair of spectacles atop his long nose, one of the lenses was missing. "It's from malnourishment. The Apes sometimes went days without throwing any scraps in the cell. We did our best to keep the portions small, so they wouldn't overfeed, but some of the mothers, they're…"

"I understand." Ignitia swallowed. "Has the dragonfly food been enough for the rest of you? As enough can be, mind me…"

"It probably saved a few lives on the spot." Frizsocket was unable to smile for long periods of time, she'd observed. He just flashed quick grins. He had merely alluded to having seen something terrible during his enslavement when questioned about it. "The condition of the little ones isn't critical, but it's enough to keep me even on my toe-claws. That medic you have? Could you spare her before you're off today?"

"Certainly." Ignitia nodded. "I'll have Taliopia make her rounds. Are there any other injuries?"

"Injuries?" Frizsocket chuckled. "That Fallen fellow passed around one of those needle-things on his waist, kept the tip clean by a flame and rag. You know Dentspeckle? The Mole with the dippy-eye? It isn't dippy anymore, and his broken leg isn't broken anymore. He works miracles, that creature. Did he really fall from the sky like the Purple Dragon is saying?"

"I've been taking her word for it, but I have my doubts." Ignitia brushed a claw. "It isn't important. Keeping you all well until we can transport you back to the city is imperative."

"You're looking for Forlorn's Vision Pool, ma'am?"

"Yes. Many of your people have already described its location, directly at the heart of the catacomb tunnels."

"It's probably buried under tons of stone and rubble. I wouldn't bother." Frizsocket wiggled his nose. "I can smell a dead effort from a mile away."

She and Frizsocket had only communed a handful of times during their trek from Forlorn to the village and during the gathering last night. He had revealed himself to be an engineer quite knowledgable on '_Animating Technology and Talking Gear-Speak'_ –as the Moles commonly quipped.

He had also been the one to reveal that the Moles had all come from the ill-fated steam vessel known as the _Hail Digger. _It had been a ship evacuating Mole warriors and their families from Tall Plains after Jute's tribe had taken the islands. Bad weather had led the ship off course before it beached west of Stormwatch, and Apes on patrol had captured the survivors.

"…_But,_" Frizsocket sighed, stuffing his paws in the little folds of his ragged vest. "you Guardian types get your eyes fixated on something, and everyone else might as well be warning a wall."

"We're known more for our tenacity than our stubbornness." Ignitia chuckled.

But, really, as she thought about it, the Mole engineer was more on the mark than she would care to admit. Ignitia never remembered being this self-conscious before…

Maybe if Cynder hadn't so effortlessly swatted away that god damned seal last night, she'd be more inclined to trust her own intuition.

"The first thing that I think you should do when we get home," Ignitia pointed a talon at Frizsocket's spectacles. "is get _those_ fixed properly."

"It's glaring, I know." Friz' wiggled his nose. "I forget the glass is gone on the left all the time now, makes me wonder if my eyesight went as wonky as I thought."

Now she felt a little better. Self-doubt was always tolerable when it wasn't limited to just _you._

* * *

{🐉}

Things felt like old times for just a second. Gray morning light streaming through her nook's little window, the unpleasant rat-ass stank of the shroom spores acting up, the warmth of her human partner overtaking her flanks.

_Wait._

Spyra groggily blinked and examined her own nesting.

_Oh, yeah._

She felt her eyelids sag and grumbled, curling her neck over the Fallen's shoulder and dozing against his exposed back. This was probably the most subdued of him she had ever witnessed. They had started resting like this originally because of how cold the swamp got at night (though, she liked to believe he'd been eyeing her up since he'd landed, even if it _probably_ wasn't true, probably) but after the battle and the temple, it only felt natural.

Her curvy purple body looked dimly azure in the shade of her childhood nook. For a while, the dragoness tried to bathe in the atmosphere of her own home, thinking about every crevice, corner and bramble making the walls, or the leaves that grew down the kitchen arch, and the remains of the massive stump that sealed the whole south end of the home…

A sudden stab of emotional dread forced her eyes open, and before she knew it, Spyra was doting on the hay and sheets making her nest past the small of the human's back.

…She might never see this place again.

The journey to Warfang.

…What if she lost? What if the Fallen lost and she couldn't take it?

So many things.

So many things to extinguish her life.

Apes, _Cynder,_ Dreadwings, collapsing towers… and, if she was to believe the Fallen's warnings, things soon to be much _worse._

She flexed her talons protectively over his soft skin, listening to him breathe as she draped herself over him like a clingy cat.

In lighter retrospect: Spyra had never felt like this with anyone before. She'd never strived for something her entire life. An almost matriarchal sense of connection to this creature, a burning, internal flame (not of her own breath element, _that_ shit was spicier) that only he quelled was deeply rooted in her body.

Spyra was addicted to this human. He was like a narrow-waisted, vital, creamy-skinned narcotic.

She hadn't stopped thinking about mating since he'd first touched her. Her insides felt different, they felt… _looser,_ almost, and were even more reactive to being touched. The dragon had been given a taste of sex two days in a row and now it was all she wanted.

_…How do I ask?_

What.

She was the _girl._ They always had the easiest times _asking._ In fact, there _was_ no asking. No straight male in the world was backing down when a female just bent the hell over and beckoned with '_Come Hither'._

Especially with her. Spyra had hips that could be legally registered as weapons.

_Maybe if I just start humping him._

Resigning to doing just that, Spyra crawled lower and jammed her nose into the center of his pectorals, inhaling the subdued, crisp scent of her own soap on his clean skin. She growled under her throat and recognized a growing purr thrumming in her breast. Her new position let her paw his shoulders and gave her thigh ample reach to spoon past his hips.

It must have been an interesting sight, this vibrating, purring reptile wriggling all over the Fallen like a cheap, on the spot companion cushion. But seeing wasn't feeling. The Fallen was _feeling,_ and a whole lot of it. After a grind or two, he started to wake up, grunting.

"…_w-whazit…_" He slurred, chin bumping into her head-fin as he tried to look down at her. "…_sspyra-wuz-u-doin…_"

"Mornin', babe." She mumbled, growling as she rubbed her dragon cunt over his flaccid member. "…_Y-You sleep well?"_

"As well as usual." He rubbed his eyes, laying a hand on her back as he put together what she was doing. "…Don't we have to get ready to leave soon?"

"_Leave-shmeave… I want my male _now_…_"

"…Right now? But…"

"-_Oh~… Ancestors…. Why do you have to be so… so…_" Spyra whined, reaching down to run his crown between her labia. "…_Fuckable?_"

"It's a positive job benefit." He twitched, sleep bleeding from his body as Spyra roused him. "…Doesn't it feel a bit weird doing this in your family's house?"

"I can't remember you complaining this much before." Spyra gasped as her fluids started to coat both of their groins. She swore, every time the Fallen touched her, it was like turning on the faucet… "C'mon, dude, your 'ness needs a good dicking to get her going today."

"I gave you a dicking just last night."

"_What?_ No you didn't, we-" Spyra blinked when her hip rolled into something wet and cold. She craned off him and past her wing to examine a noticeable splotch that had dried on one section of the nesting. "…_Oh._"

Evidence as good as any.

She must have been positively exhausted yesterday if she couldn't remember _that._

Oh well. Seconds then.

"Too bad I wasn't able to see off Harasal." The Fallen muttered offhand. "He probably left already."

"…_I thought it was Hamood…?_" Spyra mumbled, not listening as she dipped a claw between their bellies and worked him to full length. "…Y'know, I didn't say thank you last night…"

"For what?"

"You know… saving my home, destroying that tower and wiping out an Ape army because I asked real nice?"

"Huh, well when you put it that way…"

"Guess I'll just have to make up for it by letting you rail me again." She chuckled, shivering as she stuffed his crown through the first of her heavenly folds, sinking against his pelvis. "…_OoooOoohhh yeah…~ -Hey,_ whatchyu' doin'-?"

The Fallen groggily climbed onto his knees as he gripped her digitigrade ankles and bundled them together just ahead of her belly. Every motion was characterized with a tired grunt. For all either of them knew, his body was on sex-machine autopilot.

"…_this is new…~_" Spyra licked her chops as he aligned her vertically, gripped her higher ass-cheek and started pumping. "…AA_AHhh-~!_"

"_Shoosh!_" He hissed.

"-_T-Then _stop t_-_t-_thrusting so good-!_" Spyra's head rocked as the Fallen penetrated her in a comfortable pattern of wet slaps. She chewed on her talons to muffle a groan as she fell into the nesting and hiked her hips higher to give him better reach. "…_OooohIdon'tcare… just breed me…~_"

"_-W-What if someone hears us?_" He grunted between pounds, his eyes darting for the nook's arch.

Did anyone even realize he was sleeping in the same nest with her?

"…_Nobo-_dy-_is… go_ing-_to hear us-now harder… harder, damn it…~ -_Hey! _You listenin'? I said HARDER!_" She barked. The Fallen whimpered- half in fright of her lust-rage and half out of terror of being walked in on –and started jamming his hips to meet hers even faster. "-_Ooohhhthat'stheticket-! AhhhhhHhahahhhh…~_"

Wet plaps sounded around the room as Spyra's body hurriedly lubed them both up. She dragged her golden horns into the nesting and let her tail swing impatiently as he fucked her.

"…_Someone's loud this morning…_" The Fallen panted amid his hammering, cold energy stabbing through his veins as the early morning sex invigorated his dormant systems. "…_Y-You didn't tell anyone about us… didn't you? What do we do if they find out _this_ way?_"

Spyra was beside herself and could only respond with a pained mewl, her heavy backside rippling each time he spread her flower, leaving silvery juice-trails to link their hips with every draw-back.

"…_S-Spyra-_" He grunted. "-_A-Answer me._"

"_We'll ask them if they want to watch, 'cause I ain't stopping!_" She snapped at him, her tail snaring over his leg and squeezing. "_Now quit complainin' and get back to breedin'. W-What are you, a one-pump-chump or somethin'?_"

"-_O-One p-pump-?! You- You little-! Mmf-!_"

"-_AhhhhhhAHHAHH-~!_"

* * *

{🐉}

"Thankyou Mrs. Spyra's Mom." Taliopia took the teacup daintily, her rose eyes gleaming with a barely suppressed urge to grab Cometcu and hug her.

She had such a cute face. It reminded the dragonfly matron of Spyra when she had been a hatchling. Innocent, curious, naive…

"You can just call me Cometcu, sweetie."

"I can," The medic trailed, taking a sip from her little cup. "but it kind of feels _rude._"

Cometcu chuckled as she hefted the pitcher back and placed it on the ground. In the village center, she had come out to help with any medical necessities before the Moles inevitably left. While work had been slim (on account of the Fallen's injector-devices) the regenerative properties of the devices did not cure sickness. Natural balms, herbal remedies and light touches of plant-magic were at Cometcu's disposal as she worked with ailing Mole infants and adults who had been hit hardest inside Cynder's slave pit.

Taliopia had done such a good job, however, that she found herself in even _that_ manner hardly needed. The medic may have been meek, but no one could doubt the tenacity of her professional skill. Taliopia could brew elixirs, comfort her patients, and apply ointments all at the same time. Cometcu hadn't seen anything like it.

"You do such good work, Taliopia." Cometcu sighed happily, eyes sweeping over the Moles and her kin fluttering between them. "What was all that nonsense you were saying about yourself last night? That you couldn't do anything right?"

"…I really can't though…" Taliopia muttered, swishing the tea inside her cup around as she stared into it. "…I was drafted into the dragon armies because I was needed to _fight,_ and be brave and strong. I-I'm not any of those things… I was always alone when I was younger, and the other hatchlings used to laugh at me because I liked stuffed animals. I never left the den without one."

"There's nothing wrong with liking… _stuffed-animals… _They aren't actual animals, are they?"

"_HmHmm~!_" Taliopia's dark mood was lifted with an amused giggle. "_No,_ silly, they're made from fabrics and wool and string. There are vendors in Warfang who sell them for hatchlings all down the market squares, next to the candy stalls and the sparkler carts. I really miss those times. I have a whole collection back home! Stuffed kitties, and puppies and dragons and rabbits…"

"My my, that sounds extensive and expensive…"

"Not really! My daddy has a lot of money, so does mommy. He's a councilor for the city and she's a merchant wharf owner down in Beacon. They took real good care of me, and privately schooled me, and never let me go outside and-" Taliopia wiggled her nose and noticed Cometcu's concerned look. She sneezed cutely and changed the subject. "-B-But then my daddy got mad one day and said that we weren't above what '_Common-Dragons' _had to go through, because all the families around us had uncles, sons and fathers getting drafted. He and mommy had a fight with some of the other nobles and afterward they… kind of… forced me to go to the academy. But for all the right reasons! It really forced me out of my shell! ….Sort of.

"I failed all the combat courses and strength tests, and the other students made fun of me, and in the female dorms, one time this nasty dragoness named _Rava_ hid worms inside my nesting, and laughed when I screamed. I-I don't think professor Cyrila liked me much either, and Terradora sneered at me when I went into her classes.

"It didn't help that the only drakes who ever asked to court me I always… _rejected_, because I liked other females, and when I tried to tell people that, they thought I was gross."

"…Well, this isn't a very nice story." Cometcu dusted her little hands and hovered closer to her. "Why not try to recall all the positive things you've had happen to you?"

"…Oh, sure! Lots of stuff like that happened!" Taliopia nodded rapidly, clutching her tea. "I always passed with flying colors my alchemy and study courses. And all the other unpopular dragons thought I was cool. Professor Volteera really liked me, because I didn't always run away when she started talking, so sometimes after hours, me and her would walk around the gardens and libraries, and she'd tell me about how she couldn't stand everyone hating her, and that she wanted to d-"

"_-Positive,_ Taliopia, think positive." Cometcu stopped her.

"…I-I met Morinth at the academy." Taliopia blushed. "One time, Rava and a bunch of other dragonesses were penning me in a hallway, and Rava said she was going to electrocute me until my wings looked like a Night Dragon's… But then, _an actual Night Dragon_ busted through them! W-Well, a _half Night Dragon,_ Morinth's daddy was a Night Dragon, her mom was a flame dragon, but she got her dad's scales which was why everyone was afraid of her. She scared Rava and the others away and asked if I was alright, and…"

Taliopia paused, her talons tightening on her teacup.

"I just remember that she had the prettiest eyes." She muttered. "I had never seen another dragon who had emerald green eyes like hers. I love her eyes."

"Ah, see? There's a much more lovely thing to remember. You and Morinth, you've been… _mated?_"

"S-Something like that…" The medic flushed, embarrassedly looping a talon around her cup's rim after a quick sip. "…I started staying around her after that, and all the bullies left me alone, but all of my friends also left me, because they were afraid Morinth was still loyal to the Dark Continent, which she isn't! And never has been… Morinth walked the gardens with me, and told me about how she grew up. She didn't have anything, and was living in the sewers for years before she got old enough to join the academy and train to be a warrior. I told her I could do anything if she was with me, one day in the gardens. That was when she first kiss-"

Taliopia shuddered and drank down the rest of the tea.

"Are you alright?" Cometcu blinked. The medic was shivering, and her eyes were darting all around the village.

"H-Have you seen Spyra at all?" Taliopia quietly cleared her throat, putting her cup down.

"I think she's still sleeping in. It's the least I can do for her after all she went through the last few days…" Cometcu looked over at her family thicket. "…I think all of you could have used a late start today, but Ignitia was insistent we prepare early on."

"W-What about the Fallen?" Taliopia gulped, flapping her wings. "Have you seen him at all?"

"Not since last night." Cometcu shook her head. "…He's a mysterious sort of thing. A lone example of a race no one's ever heard of? At least, if everything I hear from you and your clansmen is accurate. All of you look like aliens to us!" She laughed.

Taliopia awkwardly laughed too and stood up, giving the Moles a last few glances.

"Did anyone else need any help?"

"No, I think we took care of everything." Cometcu said. "Is something wrong, Taliopia? You look… _jittery._"

"Jittery? _Ah-hahah~! No! Silly,_ I'm not… I'm n-not _jittery._" Taliopia started shivering even worse now, practically vibrating as she pointed for the thicket and started trotting over, her steps rigid and awkward. "-I'm just gonna' go check if she's up. I'll let her sleep if she isn't."

"There's more tea in the kitchen nook." Cometcu called over. Taliopia answered her with a strange head movement that somehow mixed a nod and shake at the same time. The dragonfly crossed her arms and huffed.

All of these foreigners were so peculiar.

* * *

{🐉}

Taliopia went to hunt down the tea on account of her dry mouth, but was halted the second she passed through the thicket's front arch.

There was a whole lot of noise distantly muffled in the very back of the home. Shuffling sounds, crinkling of fabrics and a resounding thud that was in a practiced pattern.

The medic gulped and stood in the foyer nook, trying to listen in and piece together what it all was.

…_Is that Spyra's voice? Why does it sound like she's crying? Or hurt?_

Taliopia brought the forward tips of her wings down to fidget with them. When that did nothing to stop her shivering, she chewed a thumb.

…_But if she was hurt, she'd be-_

_"-FUCK-! Fu-_uck-_kkk…. Ohhhhh~ that's it… right there…_"

_What in the world…?_

_"-Harder… do it harder-! YEAH-! Just like that, harder-_harder-! _AhhhhHahahhh…~!_"

Rhythmic grunts, a wet clapping.

It was the Fallen she was hearing.

The Fallen was hurting Spyra!

And she was…. _encouraging it?_

Taliopia broke her tension all at once and trotted deeper inside Spyra's home, her rosy eyes darting about to the inside of Lightnux and Cometcu's nook, Firefly's, and finally…

"…_S-Spyra…? A-Are you alri-_"

"-_Right there-! Right theerree-ohhhh-FUCK-~!_"

The Fallen jackhammered his hips forward one last time, slamming it home into Spyra's cunt with a resounding clap of skin to scales. The purple dragoness' jaw hung as her eyes rolled back and she moaned at the ceiling, drool dripping from her tongue's tip as she and the human started rolling their pelvises into one another.

There was a faint spattering noise and a periodic squelch. Snugly inserted to the base in Spyra's spread, pink lips was the Fallen's pale-skinned dick, twitching as it dumped the full might of his balls into her egg-cooker. Thick tendrils of white, intermixed fluid seeped from the merger and ran down Spyra's ass cheek. Someone could've been outside the thicket for a few feet and still smelled the wafting musk of interspecies sex.

"…_Ohhhgawd- that never gets old…~_" Spyra moaned, rolling her hips into him more and making him grunt. Steam spired from her mouth and nose. She was grinning stupidly and licking her fangs, eyes heavy and locked on his own. "…_Talk about _hot,_ human-boi'… I'm burnin' up…_"

The Fallen made a noise not completely dissimilar to a balloon deflating as he hugged Spyra's plump backside, and craned over to bite her shoulder. The dragoness giggled as he rolled her onto her back and spread out her thighs, working their messy union with some slow, weak humps.

"…_Round two already…?_" Spyra breathed, ragged as he started to rock her into the nest. "…_Don't let me stop you, big-boy…~ Pump me full enough times with your babies, and I might just pop…~"_

The Fallen only grunted and grit his teeth, his sore hips finding strength in a renewed offensive as he began to breed the curvy dragoness yet again. There was part of him that felt like a prisoner, a slave almost, to her dirty-talking and very persuasive ways…

…One could've shed a tear for his terrible plight. His terrible, rabidly humping, squishy plight…

"…_I think you were going easy on me~._" Spyra moaned, jolting with each impact as she clawed his arms and let him go to town. "-_Look at me- Look at me…. C'mere… You hear me? I want you to _fuck_ me. Fuck your dragon raw. Pound some eggs in me. Pound 'em damn it~._"

The Fallen had seen some shit.

He'd watched innocent people die in all kinds of horrific ways. He'd seen allies felled, cities burned, opportunities of centuries missed, and beautiful things become degraded and lost…

…None of that had ever gotten him to _whimper,_ like a starving dog being denied a biscuit.

Spyra was the first one to ever get that out of him. For that, he would forever be begrudgingly acknowledging of.

He just… couldn't fuck her hard enough, fast enough or deep enough. She made it impossible! She was a narcotic, a purple, curvy, velvety soft substance that had completely slipped from his control…

Some of her happy cries were actually from slight _pain_ after the last few pistoning humps. But Spyra got a high from the discomfort. A little pain was to her liking, she had found. Rough sex for her was key.

"…_Y-You ever have a 'ness before like me~?_" Spyra growled at him, his sweaty face hovering just over her snout as he banged the piss out of her. "_-I bet y-you _ah-~! _Haven't… no sir… n-not at all like me…~ I-I'm your hot, scaly, purple fuck-meat right? Meant to catch your whelps… be your spurt-sack? Your cum-dumpster-womb…~" _

**_Plat-plat-plat-plat-plat-!_**

His hips were starting to catch on fire, but that was irrelevant. In this moment, he was a depraved animal whose sole purpose was to rut this beautiful reptile into the dirt. Pretty soon, they'd have to start using a collar.

…_Kinky._

-But really, what was the limit? When had someone, _anything_ ever driven him this crazy? The Fallen couldn't even remember where he was or what world he was in anymore. His whole head was swimming around the singular ideal: _thrust until detonation._

_Fuck the derg-puss._

It was at these times, in his astrological career that he was happiest, balls deep in a squealing dragoness.

Life truly had few other pleasures that could compare.

But all good things had to come to an end eventually…

Spyra might have started to conjure up some other vulgar string of words for him, but she lost them quickly as a deep, and very _very_ loud moan started to creep up in the back of her throat.

The dragoness' entire body was aflame, and she couldn't feel her nesting under her anymore, suddenly under the impression that she was floating.

The Fallen's breathing had become loud enough that he was wheezing, his vocals grinding like the grumble of an angry lion. The fluids from their first merger had created a spiderlimbed coating over both their bellies and was now about to be joined. It was also the source of the loudened, moist slaps echoing throughout the nook.

Spyra clawed at his shoulders, reared back her horned head, and _wailed._

It was quite a unique noise, if not embarrassing, even to be witnessed by the man she was getting penally-wrecked by.

The Fallen jammed into her cunt one last time, groaning all kinds of tones out as he shot an even bigger load into her used hole. There was so much cum that it could be _heard._ It pattered onto the nesting, pooled in Spyra's rear crevice and over her tailbase, and seeped in the form of thick mounds from between her stuffed labia. The human filled her to the absolute brim, so much so that Spyra's insides had to start regurgitating some of the shipment back in the direction it had cum from.

All was still, minus the faint drip, and the combined pants of a human and his dragoness fuck-sleave.

Spyra wordlessly listed an eye open, clawed at his neck and forced his head down with a single tug, jamming their mouths together in a wet duel of slapping tongues, clicking fangs and teeth and fleeing reams of saliva. She mournfully moaned and flexed her quadruped body into him, grinding her wet scales into him with drunken abandon.

Neither of them said anything to each other as they unlinked their mouths and blinked at one another. The Fallen was the first to giggle, like a little school girl.

"…Who's the _whale-interpreter _now?" He chortled.

"…_Pfffttt~ shut up, dude…_" Spyra laughed.

**_Drip…. Drip…_**

-They'd been locked in this long enough to know the sound of their own dripping.

Both the Fallen and Spyra's eyes glued in horror to the arch frame of her room nook.

"…Oh my god." The Fallen mumbled.

Taliopia looked… well, she looked off enough to be kindly labeled as: _concerning._

For starters, her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. In fact, in the brief time they'd known the meek medic, neither of them had ever seen her rosy eyes so largely displayed. It looked like they might pop right out of their sockets.

Secondly, her wings were brushing against the nook's ceiling in a full-on preen. Her whole body was shivering so violently that the little alchemical viles hanging from her hip sash were jingling, like makeshift Christmas bells.

However, it was the source of the _drip_ that piqued both of their interests.

Taliopia's hind legs were spread, her tail lifted behind her, and she was _leaking._ To punctuate the point: another clear droplet of nectar fell from her and pattered into the rest of its scrumptious kin on the floor.

The poor medic opened her mouth, could only force out a squeak, and then…

**_P-dfffttt~! _**–her body made a tumbling sound as it collapsed just outside the arch. Her wing stood upright in the air, twitched, and then draped stilly behind her. For all either of them knew, Taliopia had up and dropped dead.

"-_Tali'!_" Spyra squeaked.

The Fallen scrambled off her, leaving an unfortunate trail from the nest to the arch as he knelt over Taliopia's prone form and held a hand in front of her snout. When he felt the cool wash of breath, he touched her forehead, then checked her pulse.

"…She fainted again." He sighed.

"_Oh,_ thank the Ancestors, I thought something a little more serious had happened that time… Poor girl's more naïve than she looks." Spyra wiped her forehead and lounged in her soiled nesting, playing with the fluids bundled in her crotch with two talons idly. She glanced at the Fallen's legs. "…_unlike some…_"

"What?" He jumped back into the nook and scrambled for a towel. "Did you say something? We need to clean this mess up!"

"I'm used to the messy lifestyle, it's just the filth has a little variation now…" She dismissively waved a paw at him, watching as he darted around, picking things up, wiping at things, wiping _himself_ and bundling more rags. "…So we took a little longer than I thought we would, big whoop. It isn't like we let the war go by or nothin'…"

"What is she going to say to everyone when she wakes up? Are you not worried about this?" The Fallen asked. Spyra couldn't tell if his voice actually had the edge of concern in it. Just curiosity.

"Are _you_ worried?" She chuffed.

"A… A _little?_ I…" He shivered as he dragged his junk through a clean towel. "…I haven't gone through any particular trouble to _hide anything,_ I was assuming most people down here were deliciously dense…"

"_Deliciously._" Spyra parroted, running the word over her tongue as she brought her talons up to examine them in the morning light, glistening with their combined essences. "…That's not a word I'm used to hearing from you…"

"…_Uhm…_" He froze in the middle of the nook, mid-wipe with a towel. "…M-Must've just been a slip."

"Must have." Spyra flicked her claw, like she was trying to rid herself of a booger she'd picked. "…_Well! _Good news is: I feel ready to take on the world! Thanks for stokin' the fire, babe'."

Taliopia moaned on the floor and her leg twitched, bumping against the arch frame.

"…Been there, baby, been there…" Spyra rolled her eyes, her tail whipping as she rubbed her golden stomach. "…Hey, Fallen? You said I could talk to you about anything, yeah?"

"…_Of course._" He paused, reaching down for his jumpsuit. "We did just finish having sex. I'm pretty sure the barricades are _way down_ by this point…"

"Y'know I was thinking about where we're going with all this… Off to Warfang, leaving the only land I've ever known since my hatchday, and siding up with the Dragon Realms in this upcoming battle…"

"…Yeah? All things happening, surely…"

"I know I'm rushing into all this, and it's a little late to back down- _not that I'm backing down –_but, in your opinion, as a competent fighter yourself…" Spyra wormed in the nesting to crane her snout up at him, her eyes gleaming in the morning light. "Do you think I'm ready?"

"I think even if you didn't _believe_ you were, you wouldn't have a choice." He knelt down and pecked her on the nose, before handing her a towel. "But now, you don't have to do this alone. Get ready, I'm going outside for appearance sake."

He stepped over Taliopia and moved into the hallway.

"-_Pretend like nothing happened! I'll talk to Taliopia when she wakes up!_" –He called to her.

"Well where are yu' goin'?" Spyra yelled, dabbing at the goop gathered in her lap. "Typical male move, dude, fuckin', creamin', leaving the female with the mess!"

"_I have to talk to Ignitia!_"

"_Ha! _You should tell her I'm pregnant! Guarantee you she'll scream…" Spyra chuckled as she wiped herself. "…_that'd be funny as shit._"

Taliopia moaned again and her tail twitched. Spyra looked up and waved a claw at her, going: "_Ahhhhhh get over it you'll live" –_before tossing a rag at her and getting back to work.

* * *

{🐉}

His jumpsuit felt a little loose, but some tugging and yanking fixed that in a jiffy. His skin still felt cool and warm at the same time around his hips and belly, echoing quite pleasant memories that he was forced to suppress lest an unfortunate public after-boner sparked up in the presence of a crowd.

"Mornin' fellas." He waved at Torrdonal and Corrinthol.

"Good morning." Torrdonal awkwardly grinned as the alien passed them. "…Gee', he sure seems in a chipper mood. He must have slept really good."

"Of course the alien slept good, he _feeds_ on terrible environments… like the spawn of evil he really is…" Corrinthol tiredly sipped at an amber-beer cup, slapping his chops with distaste. "-_Blegh! _Do these dragonflies make anything _not_ overtly sweet?"

"I kind of like it." Torrdonal sipped his own cup. Corrinthol glared.

"Oh yeah? Think about it, Tor', there's a little gold pool of _water_ inside that cup, and it's on your chops."

Torrdonal gasped and dropped his cup, clawing at his face in terror.

"-_Water-!_" He squawked.

The Fallen didn't have to walk long before finding her. Ignitia was brooding on a hilltop overlooking the village, her eyes locked to the north, in the direction of Forlorn.

As he jogged over, he noticed her amber eyes sweeping the partially cloudy skies above, as if she was willing Cynder to materialize from them and return.

"Ignitia." He called, sidling up behind her.

The great fire dragoness jolted and spun to face him, her wings spread and her tail quite active. A mourning expression was now replaced with a sharp one that he couldn't immediately read.

_Was she angry? Surprised? _

"I just wanted to speak with you before we-"

"I demand you explain your _interactions_ with Spyra this minute, Fallen."

…_Ah. Angry it was._

"-Pardon?" He cocked a brow.

"What lies have you filled that young hen's mind with? What have you told her she is to you?" Ignitia loomed closer, teeth exposed in a snarl. "What have you done to _my Spyra?_"

"Y-Your…?" He shook his head. _That_ was an issue he was unwilling to touch at the moment. "…_Listen,_ Ignitia, I have to respectfully say that what Spyra chooses to do in her private life is strictly _her_ business. But that isn't what I came up here to-"

"Is that what you think are? Some world-hopping _mediator_ who thinks he can judge everyone around him? Make decisions for them? Because they don't know any better, like the primitive buffoons they are?" Ignitia ranted. "You have quite the gall and nerve, _human._ I cannot take away the great deed you have done for the Dragon Realms by destroying Forlorn, but it does not give you the right to be such a sanctimonious _adulterist!_"

"A-Adulterist?" He blathered. "Wait just a minute there, I haven't even been given a chance to explain-"

"You're _using her!_" Ignitia shrieked. "Using such a lonely, hormonal _hatchling_ for your own sick perversions! That's what this is! You- You- _rapist!_"

"God _damn it_ why do people keep calling me that?!" He barked at the sky, and then turned back to her. "I feel for your loss, truly, I do, I've lost more people than I can count! Young and old! Spyra's egg was supposed to be the daughter you never had! I get it, Ignitia, I understand what you're going through! But for the love of the land, you cannot appoint yourself _life-coach._ Not to me, not to Spyra! Not to anyone here. Moral policing never works."

"So then what about yourself? You seem so ready to compose the discussion and portray _me_ in the antagonistic light. What about _you?_ Who are you to judge for her, for me? Where my place is, where _hers_ is?" Ignitia stepped dangerously close to him, fire flickering just behind her fangs. Caught in the gray light, wrought with battle-fury and twisted with anger, the Guardian looked strangely beautiful, if not fierce. "You did this back at the tower as well! Trying to redirect my goals! _Speaking for my own interests!_"

"It's a consul! My own!" The Fallen tapped his chest. "I'm trying to keep you all alive and healthy. Those papers- while, really, I am happy for you that you were able to recover them –were _not_ the priority! And you unnecessarily risked your life for them! The same goes here, you're prodding in a life that is not your own, and I understand why you're doing that, it's because you care for Spyra, you _love_ her as a child, and you're wondering what she is doing with herself. Who is she doing it with? _Why?_

"So before you start screaming in my face any further, let me just remind you that her interests are also _my own,_ and that I am only risking her life on this journey because the fate of your entire world depends on it! If I had my way, I would pack myself, her and Cyn-"

The Fallen caught himself, breathed, and spoke again.

"-_myself and her,_ and I would rip a portal open back to where I came from. So I could _cherish her,_ and keep her safe and out of harm's way. Because that is what she has become to me, this living being that I _strive for._ One of many! Call me what you will, but I absolutely refuse to accept the titles of _rapist _and_ adulterist. _My morals may be up for question, but hell claim me the day I force myself on or manipulate a female for my own ends."

Ignitia was heaving with what was obviously pent-in rage over the last night. She'd probably been up on this hill for a long time, rehearsing her confrontation with him.

"…And for the record," He sighed, deflating his tone. "…I approached you initially seeking to apologize for what I said yesterday. My only concern was preserving life, yours, Spyra's, the whole party. It wasn't because I was trying to _enlighten_ you to some foreign concept of perfection. You were right in seeking those documents, because they are irreplaceable, and they do contain your people's history, and history is important, lest we repeat its low points."

Ignitia opened her mouth, but instead of retorting, offered a snort, and shook her head, stamping to face away from him with an offended growl.

"…And also, I appreciate you looking out for her. So thank you for that."

Ignitia huffed, and lowered the stance of her wings, forcing the anger to drain from her like blood from a wound.

"…I have never been so stressed in my entire life." She quietly admitted. "This war predates my hatchday. By hundreds of years, and yet it feels like the full weight of it is upon _this_ generation's wings. That our decisions are reliant upon the fate of our world, and likewise. I can't even decide what is more important anymore. I feel like my life has become a game of scales. What do I care for just a little less, that I am willing to sacrifice?"

Ignitia smiled sourly before burying it in a frown.

"And after all was said and done: you were correct. The lives of my Wing are more important than the recovery of documents and relics. My mistake was placing priorities in my profession as a historian, and not as a warrior. Right now, the Dragon Realms need more of those than bookkeepers." Ignitia glanced at him. "…Maybe it's fate's workings that such a warrior as yourself was brought to us at the perfect hour. Maybe I am simply envious and unbelieving of that, that a champion for Spyra would come on flames from above."

_Yeah, _fate's_ workings…_ the Fallen glared at the sky for a second before holding a hand out.

"Ignitia, if saving your world is an option to me, then I will take it, with Spyra, with _you,_ with the Wing, and with your people. I just want you to see that I'm on your side."

"Our side _and_ your own." Ignitia stroked one of her facial fins. "You have interests just as all neutral parties do, Fallen. But I am willing to see that with such in mind you still have your priorities linked with ours. I value your addition to the alliance against Malefora."

"Ah, well… _good,_ that that's cleared up." He folded his arms and grinned at her cheaply. "…uhm, lovely day, right?"

"Cynder was able to so effortlessly break my binding seal." Ignitia said. "She has become more powerful since the last I saw of her. You didn't happen to witness her escaping from the thicket?"

"I had just walked in when she broke free." He explained quickly. "She knocked me clear and flew off."

"…._Mmmm….._" She hummed. "…was that before or after you brought her a platter of food?"

"P-Platter of food? _Pfft, _ what are you talking about-"

Ignitia held up a scorched, dragonfly platter that had been sitting beside her on the edge of the alcove. She wiggled it, black chips falling off from the magical scorching it had taken.

"…I picked this out of the rubble this morning." She explained with a tone of disinterest. "I happen to recall your absence after Morinth was done performing. What _were_ you doing, if not bringing a midnight snack to the enemy?"

"…You're a trip, lady." The Fallen ran a hand through his hair. "We go from blinding rage, to calmness, to accusations… Is it a _fire dragon_ thing?"

"As I said, you have ulterior motives." Ignitia put the platter down and whipped her tail. "Just so _you_ understand, I am aware of them."

"I'm so happy you are." He shrugged, voice turning a bit darker with sarcasm. "We know she's going to her castle to regather her strength. In Concurrent Skies."

"What do you know of the Concurrent?" Ignitia shook her head. "That is a realm far more hostile and unknown than these swamps. You'll seldom find threats from giant insects or Toadworts in its crystalline caverns and snowy wastes… all of that is assuming you can ever get through the gigantic, damned magical storm that's been raging around the islands for over a thousand years."

"I never said I devised a plan, I just have a location." He shrugged again. "For what little consolation you'll accept, I highly doubt Cynder will be able to move for a good while after such a defeat. I mean, Visigoth's whole tribe got iced in a single-"

"-_Wooo-! Lookout!_"

**_Pnnchhh~! _**–something smacked off the back of the Fallen's head, knocking him over, and startling Ignitia.

A tumble of limbs and the thud of a draconic body later, the Fallen shook his head and made to stand up, but paused when he found his palms sinking into something very warm, soft and _scaly._

He looked down and Ignitia looked back up at him.

She must've scrambled and landed on her back, and he had followed. The stinging pain where he'd been hit in the back of the head was forgotten.

"…Actually," The Fallen inhaled deeply. "you _do_ really smell like cinnamon."

"_Ugh~!_" Ignitia kicked him in the gut and sent him tumbling, righting herself with a pattern of huffs and snarls. She hadn't been quick enough, however, and the damage had been done.

The Guardian gasped as unexplainable sensations broiled in her limbs and nested in her hips.

_Oh no._

She shivered and curled her tail around herself, frightened at the feelings flooding her veins. She glared at the Fallen, and then at the thing that had hit him.

It was a… wooden disk.

"Sorreh abou that one, Master, I was tryin to play _frizzbee _with Meep!" Palmet scurried over and snatched the makeshift toy off the ground. Nearby, Meep squeaked and hopped on his tentacles, holding two up in a catching motion. "-_Dawwww! _Ain't he just a beautiful little fing? I nevva really undastood how peepol lived without burnin stuff and stealin valuables, but I gotta say, this _urban lifestyle_ ain't half bad-"

The Fallen stomped over and backhanded him across the jaw. There was a **_crack! _**–and Palmet staggered back with a yowl.

"Strike me with your _frizzbee _again, and I'll break a foot off in your ass, _butler._" The Fallen growled.

"S-Sure fing, Master." Palmet righted his jaw and rolled it a few times. "…Huh, don't feel that much different from when the Mistress wuz in charge. Goody! At least my schedule's back in right order!"

"…Anyway, what were you saying?" The Fallen rubbed his head and looked at Ignitia.

"We're _leaving._" She snarled, tearing away and stomping back towards the village. "And I'm _not_ carrying you on my back to get there."

* * *

{🐉}

Even if Torrdonal or Corrinthol could have dealt with the Fallen's weight, she doubted either of them would have accepted the charge. Morinth couldn't do it either, though her emerald eyes experienced a strange glazed-over look when she was asked.

"…I-I might give it some thought if'n it was in my ability…" She stammered, Ignitia gawking at the flush on her snout.

But then again, the very mention of him gave her… _feelings too._

_Oh Ancestors._

No wonder Cynder had fled without exacting revenge on them all. The Fallen was a curse, corrupting every female dragon he touched. The poor Guardian- in addition to everything else straining her mind –was now stricken with shivers and twitchy behavior ever since he'd collapsed onto her.

She envied Spyra when she revealed herself almost an hour later from her family thicket, blessed with a warm and wide smile and the most relaxed demeanor Ignitia had ever witnessed.

"You okay, Ignitia?" Spyra had blinked when Ignitia started to twitch.

"F-Fine." The Guardian quietly quipped through grit fangs. "How about yourself?"

"_Peachy like a plum~._" Spyra sighed dreamily, itching at something on her waist. "What's for breakfast? I'm starved."

Ignitia quietly suffered as they scarfed down more dragonfly food. She barely touched anything of her own, her eyes constantly darting on the growing array of things brewing internal strife within her heart.

The Fallen, uncomfortably meeting her glares with pathetic attempts at occasional smiles as he ate. Spyra- _her hatchling –_stuffing her purple face full of berries and juice as she went on and on about how amazing the battle yesterday was. Ignitia's face looked like ice as she forced herself to nibble on an apple. Eventually, trying to mentally strangle or mind-erase half the people around her proved too ineffective, and so she resorted to simply staring at the clouds, wishing Cynder would come back so that she could kill the corrupted 'ness in an extremely painful way.

She cowed herself for how she was thinking. She was by far _not_ a violent individual, and yet right now, she couldn't think of anything _but_ violence. She was so angry. So _confused._

All in the span of two days: she'd been irresponsible, _her hatchling_ had been… _whatever she had been_ by the Fallen, and the Fallen had also at least colluded in a culinary way with the enemy! For all Ignitia knew, it had been the _human's doing,_ the erasure of her warding spell and the snapping of Cynder's binds!

_He could be a traitor…_

Ignitia probably resembled a scheming, deranged hermit with the kind of death-glare she was shooting at the human.

_A traitor who has infected me with some magical ward of his own! One I can't break…_

Ignitia's jaw quivered as she bit her apple in half, and chewed with her mouth open.

_I'm too fuckin' old for all this nonsense. _

"Has anyone seen Tali'?" Morinth swallowed a mouthful of berries and looked around. "She was up earlier this morning…"

"-_She took a nap._" The Fallen held a finger up, startling Torrdonal beside him with how loud and quick he jumped to the fore. Ignitia narrowed her eyes and scorched the remains of her apple mid-swallow as fire brewed in her throat. "She was exhausted from last night apparently, having cuddled too many dragonflies."

"_Oh, _that cheeky girl." Morinth hummed musingly. "She's not needed on the outing, is she, mam'?"

"**_Noooooo…._**"

Everyone stared at Ignitia, even Corrinthol, who let a rogue berry slip from his mouth.

The Guardian had sounded like a snake.

"Damn." Spyra grinned, eating another wad of berries. "Way ta' get your battle-lust up, Ignitia. If there's anything in those ruins, we'll _scare_ it to death before we even touch it!"

The Fallen made a noise halfway between a laugh and a cough, and then downed an entire pitcher of juice.

"…I know there's something going on, actually_ a lot of things_ going on here…" Corrinthol picked up a pear and pointed around the gathering with its stem. "…It's just a good thing it's all so beneath me that I don't care."

**_W-pshkkk~! _**–Palmet's frizzbee bounced off the back of the fire drake's head sharply, followed by a distant apology from the Ape himself.

Spyra shot cranberry juice from her nose and rolled on the ground cackling like a madwoman.

"Uhm…. _Wingleader?_ Are you okay?" Torrdonal asked, concerned.

"I'm quite okay." Ignitia laughed, startling him. "_Quite okay._"

"So who's going to carry the Fallen?" Morinth hummed as she ate. "None of us can do it, we're only a little bigger than him anyway."

"Well, the Wingleader is the largest matriarch in the Wing." Torrdonal helpfully suggested.

Ignitia shot fire from her nostrils and scorched a fern.

"_We're leaving!_" She belted. "I said so an hour ago and all of you sat down to _eat breakfast! _For some of you: _second breakfast! _We are now _marching, flying, as an order!_"

"Right-O, mam'!" Morinth sprung up like a jackrabbit. "Let me just get my tail-blade, can't go into a fight underprepared."

* * *

{🐉}

The Fallen felt like he was riding on an iceberg, which was strange given Ignitia's natural element…

The Guardian was rigid with every wing flap, dive and ascent, and her spine felt like it had been locked down over a steel bar. The human clung to her neck, eyes examining the passing swamp beneath both of them with steady interest.

This wasn't his first airborne sweep by far. There had been a world before this one that had ironed any possible fear of heights from him over a prolonged and grueling adventure in and of itself. Besides, Ignitia wasn't even flying that high in comparison.

He considered trying to converse with her during the periods where the draft was low enough that his shouting could be heard. But he took one look at the very angry expression on the side of Ignitia's snout and decided against it.

After all, he'd just started touching her this morning…

He knew how _that_ went for her people.

After some time, they encroached upon a noticeably empty-looking sort of clearing.

The flattened mounds of rubble marking Forlorn's corpse came into view, hills of wreckage permeated with the occasional still standing buttress and a lowly crackling fire.

The Fallen blinked, astonished. From above, it was revealed that the entire plateau stack Forlorn had been built into had… _cracked._ The very landscape looked broken in some places, and some of the natural step levels had tumbled over one another.

The flight of dragons landed in a clearer span of debris, Ignitia angrily rolling her wing joints and smacking him in the back and shoulders.

"_Get off please._" She grunted. He silently obeyed.

"I like the redecoration." Spyra flexed her wings, shooting a toothy grin around. "Has more of a _crumbled _sort of flavor to it."

"We're clear over here." Corrinthol grumbled, coming around from a mound of bricks.

"This side is clear too!" Torrdonal called.

"No movement, mam'." Morinth hopped over the rough terrain like a gazelle through rocks, and trotted up to Ignitia. "I found the remains of the stairwell chute. It's partially buried, but I think there's a way we can squeeze inside."

The remains of the observatory were the cap sealing the center of the site in. It resembled a cracked series of dome sections, embedded in the refuse. The party was able to slip between two busted stone slabs that had once been Forlorn's roof and ended up inside the shaded hold within.

The air in here was cool and a ghostly moan sounded out in tune with a breeze passing through all the stonework.

"I can't see anything." Corrinthol complained.

"Let me find a makeshift torch, I can-" Morinth was cut off when a flicker rang out and the dark became illuminated amber.

The Fallen had lit the end of a board aflame with some flint he'd stolen off an Ape. He gestured ahead with a nod.

"Onwards." He grinned.

The ruins created an arachnid triangle over a gaping trench descending wrecked rows of stairs. Evidently, the chute had come apart but hadn't caved in the majority of the lower skeletal structure. They could only hope the catacomb tunnels had faired similarly.

It was otherworldly, navigating the torchlit detritus. Snapped pillars, broken buttresses and twisting chunks of wall created a strange network of shapes everywhere for the light to play off, giving likeness to an odd, but massive piece of abstractionist artwork.

"Watch out." The Fallen grunted, catching Spyra when she tripped over a step that had been carved away.

"Nothing could've survived this." Corrinthol complained the whole way down, until they reached the base of the stairs. "If that _pool_ isn't in fifty pieces, I'll be shocked. My father's got access to the best engineers in Warfang, so I got _his_ eye to go off of."

"If you keep flapping your fangs like that, you might just annoy the dead enough so that they rise up and kill us." Morinth sighed. "But putting aside the peanut-gallery and its carefully considered _hunches…_ I remember this hallway. The slave pit is just down there, and the Vision Pool chamber is beyond it."

"Is it Portal or Vision?" The Fallen absently asked.

"Interchangeable." Ignitia said, refusing to look at him. "In ages past, it depended on who you asked. Central Realmers viewed them more as _Visionary_ Pools. Southerners and far West Coasterner dragons saw them more as _Portals. _Seeing as I am of Warfangian heartland descent, I call them _Vision Pools._"

"I haven't seen one of those since the academy." Said Morinth. "Too bad the only one I get to go near after all these years could possibly bewitch me and all that hubbub."

"When you all say _pool…_" Torrdonal narrowed his eyes. "…Y-You don't mean that there's _water in it?_"

"Oh, so much water. A _lake's _worth." Corrinthol snapped. Torrdonal's shriek echoed around the halls as he hid behind a masonry chunk.

"_Eew._" Spyra crinkled her nose as they passed some dead Apes, many of whom had been pancaked underneath falling debris. They smelled horrendous. "The inhabitants don't look any better than we left 'em."

"I'm not worried about Apes." Ignitia whispered as they passed through another dark frame. "I'm worried about _that._"

The Fallen's makeshift torch was no longer needed just up ahead, for the chamber beyond was already lit with an eerie, purple glow.

There was the Pool, ringed by some debris, but otherwise unscathed.

Frizsocket, Corrinthol, everyone else had been wrong. Ignitia knew it.

The Pool was brewing with swirling, pulsating, glowing dark purple energy inside its depths. It slugged around inside the rim like syrupy stew, meshed with glowing veins of pink magma and black blood.

"Does that mean it's active?" The Fallen cautiously stepped forward. "How close can we get to it without risk of something happening?"

"It is _very _active, no doubt being Malefora's eyes to observe all she has lost firstclaw." Ignitia growled, moving for the center of the chamber, bricks clattering past her paws. "_Speak_ Dark One, I know you watch us."

"No way, I get these sorta' feelings in my tail, and if that crazy bitch were here I'd-" Spyra jumped when a deep, thrumming voice echoed around the room.

"**_Hello Ignitia, have you come to rub dirt in the wound?_**"

"…Well," Morinth gawked. "_crap._"

The Pool's interior pulsed with each word, otherworldly mist bubbling up to gather in the air just above it.

"**_What made you investigate a pile of rock? You already killed all of my Apes here, slew the mighty Chieftain and drove away my creation… I needn't remind you that while this is a victory for you, it is small and easily rectified._**"

"_Stop._" Ignitia waved a paw dismissively, the air crackling as a magical band of glowing fire suddenly appeared and began to surround the whole party, floating around them like a colossal, flickering halo. The Pool pulsated brighter for a minute, and a wet gurgle of snarls echoed from its heart.

"**_Your magic couldn't hold Cynder, what makes you think it could hold me?_**"

"All one can do is try and hope." Ignitia honestly stated, face grim. "You have made Cynder so powerful in so short a time, even _you_ can't admit what she's become. Try my barrier, give me a sample of the Dark Mistress' reach, if you'd please."

Malefora gave off an unnaturally loud and sounding screech. The Pool pulsed again, brighter this time, and Ignitia's fiery ring flashed and shivered. Corrinthol screamed and hid behind Torrdonal.

"**_Bah~! I have no strength to divert for such petty grievances…_**"

"I knew something was wrong last night. Cynder's mutations… they're growing." Ignitia hummed, quirking an eye at the Pool. "At least show us your beautiful face, so you may be present for my own commentary."

A broiling cloud of vaporous color slithered over the brim and spread across the floor between them and the Pool's dais ring.

After a series of thunderous crashes and flickers of light, the whole party was blinded in a second-long flash, and when they returned their gazes….

There stood a large, Purple Dragoness, and it wasn't Spyra.

"Is _this_ better?" Malefora sounded almost nothing like her ethereal tone. She sounded…

_Sexy,_ the Fallen blinked.

_Like a self-assured bitch,_ Spyra squinted.

"Ignitia, you ask and I shall honor it, foe to foe… _here I am._" Malefora had a face that looked like it was comprised entirely of blades. Her cheekplates were sharpened, as was a pair of crowned horns and jaw thorns. Angular was her expression around slopes of armored scale. Twin amber eyes pulsed crimson light, each centered with a serpent's iris that dilated in interest with each face it fell upon.

Her body was colossal, easily the size of a bison, by the Fallen's own terms. She was two times the height of even Ignitia, who was the biggest dragon in the party. Chords of muscle made up her physique, with painfully thin limbs, a defined breast and agonizingly plump hips. Malefora was athletic, conniving, and blessed with a pair of bladed, huge, deep purple wings that were folded quaintly behind her thorned neck.

"Is that all your warband can offer me are _stares?_" Malefora smiled, rows of razor-sharp teeth glinting past her thick lower chop. The Fallen saw her tongue for a second. It was even _longer_ than Cynder's, like a whole snake was living inside her mouth…

The poor human was quivering as his eyes drank in Malefora's mutated form from her talontips to her snout.

"T-The Dark One…" Morinth stammered, stepping back to the very limits of Ignitia's protective fire ring, her emerald eyes widened with growing terror.

"_Do not step from the ring!_" Ignitia snapped. "All of you! If you are outside of it, I cannot protect you from her."

"You couldn't even protect us from _Cynder!_" Corrinthol cried from behind Torrdonal. "_We're all gonna' die because you're just a cheap magician!_"

"Cynder has become so powerful that she is freeing herself from Malefora's control, even her powers could not keep her contained. And you'll suffer the consequences of that insult when it is due." Ignitia calmly said, turning back to Malefora. "Your grip on the south is wrested, _witch._ All you have left is your Pool."

"My Pool, and the assurance of a standstill." Malefora's eyes flexed with daring. "Your powers are worthless outside your little ring, and mine inside it. Unless you plan on standing here all _day,_ my dear Guardian… It appears we are at an impasse."

The Dark One flickered her gaze to each member of the group in turn.

"…Look at this interesting little assortment you've brought me. _Let's see…_"

Morinth made a choking sound as a pair of snake-irises locked onto her. The magical impact was immediate, the poor dragoness suffering the worst effects of Fear swimming inside her guts.

"Your name, my fair hen is… _Morinth_, yes, the half-breed prodigy result of one of my less scrupulous Night Dragon warriors. Born with nothing, whose life anchors on assuring herself how far she's come. You are entirely too vulnerable to ever hope to overcome me."

She looked at Torrdonal and Corrinthol, a little laugh slipping through her fangs.

"Need I even say it? A water dragon terrified of his own element, and a narcissist who can't outsmart himself."

Torrdonal shivered violently, and Corrinthol squeaked like a mouse.

Next, Ignitia.

"So lost in your past age, Guardian Ignitia, trying to revive a time that has long since been murdered and is never coming back. You are just as pathetic as when I left you in Avalar years ago."

Finally…

"…Now _here_ is the really interesting duo of the hour. The Fallen, Warfang's Champion from the sky, and _Spyra,_ the Purple Dragon." Malefora licked her teeth, the purple glow in the room flexing between shades of pitch-black as she took a step closer, making Ignitia's fire-ring flare loudly. "One mind is much easier to pick apart than the other…"

"Yeah, I know, I got style." Spyra grinned snarkily, stepping forwards without an ounce of fear.

"I was talking about the _tall one._"

"…" Spyra looked back at the Fallen with an angry, dumbfounded sort of face. He could only shrug.

"The evil villain said it, not me." He muttered.

"…_Yeah, _well, hear me out, one Purple Dragoness to another." Spyra sneered at Malefora. "I'm coming for you as soon as I'm done kicking Cyndy-Pindy's ass, and there isn't anything you got that can stop me."

"Isolated, the only one of your kind even among your own species, soon to be betrayed by those you hold dearest…" Malefora tiredly listed off. "You and I are nothing but history's echoes. I'm just wondering how long it is going to take you to understand that this world is not worth _saving._ Once you get to Warfang, take a long look around. Spend a day in the real outside world… I'll talk to you again when you've gotten the right idea about what it is this… _pretender,_" She gestured a tailtip to Ignitia. "-is asking you to lay down your life for. The prophecies she has lied to you about are false, and have never made any sense, even hundreds of years ago when the Guardians tried to convince me of them."

"How old _are_ you?" Spyra blinked.

"_Very_ old." Malefora grinned. "Why do you think I command the power of a mountain?"

"I dunno', why don't you ever show up and _use_ that power? Instead of sending out armies of shag-rugs like Visi-_gay_ and his motley band of furry sluts to do your dirty work? You look like an ugly coward to me. And by the way? I've seen better-manicured talons on _hogs._ The hell do you use as a polisher? A fucking _plank of balsa wood?_ Forget Cynderella, you should be executing your stylist and comin' back when you're actually dressed for the occasion, you short wit, dumbass ho'."

Even Malefora's jaw dropped.

"You… purple _bitch._" She sneered in the coming silence, the Pool roaring behind her as astral fire billowed in fury past its brim. "I'm going to incinerate you."

"…Wait a second."

The Fallen stepped beside Ignitia, and reached down to pick up a rock. He chucked it at Malefora, grunting when it phased through her and clattered off the Pool's side.

"I knew it."

"Malefora would never bring herself so far away from her home like this." Ignitia shook her head. "But do not underestimate her projection. Though it is an illusion, it still commands her great powers as if she _were_ here."

"**Come out from that ring, _human!_**" Malefora's voice echoed, like there were ten of her speaking at once. "Let me flay you alive and make Spyra watch as her chosen mate is tortured to a slow, agonizing death!"

"_What'd she say?_" Corrinthol peered from over Torr's wing.

"Oh for god's sake," Spyra barked. "-me and the Fallen are _fucking! F.U.C.K.I.N.G. _There! It's out! _Everyone knows now! _I'm getting tired of this ring-around-the-rosy melodrama shit!"

"…I can't believe the rest of you hadn't worked that out…" Morinth blushed, pawing at the floor. "Cynder was right_,_ _imbeciles_, cheeky that."

"Where's Palmet to be funny when you n-need him…" _Torrdonal_ stammered. "I don't want to die!"

"We're not going to die." The Fallen growled. "Ignitia, how long can you keep that ring up?"

The Guardian glanced at Malefora.

"For a substantial time." She raised a brow. "Why?"

"Oh _yes! _I've been hearing so much about this _Fallen_ the last few evenings, how he is unassailable, a fearsome melee combatant and a master strategist! Prove it, you little _shit._" Malefora sneered. "No male could ever surpass _me._"

The Fallen paused…

"…_Oh,_" He sneered. "so _that's_ your angle, huh?"

"Heel and die!"

"Feminazis." He grunted. "Even across dimensions, I keep finding them. Time for another stamping-out I say."

Ignitia gasped as the Fallen stepped forwards and _through_ the protective ring! It flashed briefly as he appeared on the other side, eyes locked with Malefora's.

* * *

**_{Dragon Age Inquisition OST: The Battle for Haven}_**

* * *

"_Wait a minute! _We can't enact a _plan_ without someone telling me!" Spyra shrieked. "_Son of a bitch, I'm literally out of the loop!_"

"You'll know what to do!" The Fallen ripped a stick of dynamite from his bandolier and drew a blade. "_Malefora, fight me!_"

The Dark One sneered and hunched, her massive wings spreading with a crack of thunder that shook the whole chamber. Projection or not, she sure _felt_ real enough.

"Give me your _mind._" Malefora's eyes began to glow an arterial crimson. The Fallen had just struck the fuse when he began to double over, a pained groan forcing itself through his teeth. "**_Let me pick apart your little soul and be the first dragon to kill one of your kind. I have already seen who you are. You are even weaker than Cynder._**"

The Fallen fell to a knee as unnatural energies created a hurricane inside his mind. His body was out of his own control. He couldn't see, he couldn't breathe, and all he could hear were Malefora's whispers.

Spyra had already leaped through the ring, bolts of electricity springing from her mouth and stabbing into Malefora's form. The Dark One chuckled as the elemental attacks slipped through her and out the other side, like she was a ghost.

"**_Such a brash little creature._**" She murmured, gaze only briefly flickering from the suffering Fallen to her. "**_I was much the same when I was that young._**"

Spyra spread her wings and darted for Malefora's throat with an angry cry. An invisible bubble of energy flickered purple and sent her flipping back the way she'd come.

"**_However, back then I wasn't going against a goddess._**" Malefora flexed her tail, and a bolt of white lightning crossed the distance and connected with Spyra while she was trying to get up. The purple dragoness trailed soot as she sailed across the chamber and crashed into a stone wall, shattering it in a plume of dust and debris. "**_That is where you and I differ with our own plights. No one was there to help me with mine though, either._**"

Malefora snarled when a flash of orange light blinded her. Ignitia's ring had burst, and a broiling, small sun was born just above the Guardian's horns. Ignitia's face was taut with concentration as she channeled the magical flare to the very roof of the chamber. The ball of white light glared and Malefora cried as her own links to her abilities weakened.

"**_Using trickery as usual I see!_**"

The Fallen- in his last movements as he collapsed forward –tossed the dynamite in his grip, and it landed directly beside the Pool.

**_Bang~! _**–the explosion shook the whole chamber. Malefora screamed as half the brazier rim was shattered, its pieces flying through the scorched plume the explosive created. Her projection _flickered._

"_The Pool! Smash the Pool!_" Ignitia shouted. Another band of lightning crashed into her chest, and the Guardian snapped a solid stone pillar in two as she slammed right through its midsection.

Corrinthol- surprisingly –flapped his wings to cross the distance, roaring fire blew out of his mouth in a brilliant copper cone that washed over Malefora's body.

The Dark One's wings preened and all the flames vanished in a minute cough. Malefora swatted at him, and Corrinthol slid across the ground before hitting a rubble pile. Torrdonal hit her with a water-blast that similarly did nothing. He ate a lightning bolt and planted through the rim of an arch painfully.

"**_Weaklings!_**" Malefora screamed.

All at once, all three dragon soldiers, Ignitia and Spyra tore themselves from the debris, bathing Malefora in cones of fire, water and slashes from their claws and tail blades.

Malefora's form flickered with each attack but emerged without any sort of marks or damage completely. She sent a dragon cartwheeling through the air with each bat of her wing, paw or tail.

The Fallen leapt into the fray from her flank with a deafening cry, dicing a pair of Ape blades at her. The steel passed through her throat, her ribs and her leg all without effect. Malefora opened her mouth, and the Fallen went airborne as a ball of energy exploded underneath his feet.

"**_You should've stayed in your little ring, _magician.**"

Ignitia screamed as her next attack was interrupted mid-air, and she began to levitate in the center of the chamber. Malefora's eyes flexed and crimson energy started to swim around the Guardian's head, filling her mind with every single nightmare, inner fear and terror she had ever experienced. The Guardian could do nothing but wail under the horrific assault as she writhed and twisted, like someone was ripping out her guts through her mouth.

"**_What fascinates me about dragons, is that none of them seem to understand that they are my playthings. All of you were born with the purpose of serving me in my hours of needful entertainment. It is why I butcher you with such fervor: to claim my rightful throne as goddess of this world. Your lives, your battles, your accomplishments and your souls are tattered strips of nothingness on the wind. When I kill all of you, no one will ever remember you existed. I will erase you._**"

Spyra and Morinth assaulted in one fluid motion, bolts of electricity and reams of fire washed over the Pool, chipping stone and scorching the brazier.

Malefora howled as her projection's physical form jittered and twitched, like a computer screen suffering a poor connection, the Fallen observed.

The Dark One saw Spyra vanish in a burst of light that shattered the floor and ripped up the set stone in ragged banners. She turned on Morinth, and swiped with the sharp point of one of her wings.

The black dragoness had been in the process of trying to roll from the blow's path. She was too slow, and the sound of her flesh tearing echoed around the whole chamber.

Crawling from the rubble, the Fallen felt his heart drop into his feet when he saw the black dragoness flip listlessly away from the battle. She hit one of the stair flights and rolled down it like a ragdoll, settling at the base with a final toss. Her eyes were peacefully closed, and rich, draconic blood poured from a trench wrought through her belly, speedily creating a puddle.

"**_If the Fallen hadn't corrupted Cynder, none of you would have ever have had a hope in stopping my operations here!_**" Malefora shrieked. "**_Cynder was too powerful, _I _am too powerful! I'm going to kill every last one of you!_**"

Lightning shot out and took another chunk off the Pool. Malefora flinched, her wings spreading out to steady herself. Ignitia dropped to the floor.

"-_Hit it!_" Spyra blubbered, clawing out from the last pile of rocks she'd been buried in. One of her eyes was swelled shut, and she was drooling blood. "_Hit the damned thing!_"

Ignitia stumbled to her paws, and bounded forward.

"_Ignitia!_" The Fallen called, lighting another dynamite stick, before he hurled at her. "_Catch!_"

Ignitia jumped, dodging one of Malefora's clumsily aimed tail swipes. She caught the dynamite in her mouth, bounding for the Pool like a horse.

As she passed along its flank, she spat the explosive right into the swirling Convexity energies brewing inside. Malefora's defiant scream was silenced when the Pool imploded.

**_Banngg~! _**–the Pool and the dais underneath it shattered in a violent blast of soot and purple fire. Malefora's projection reared back its head, an unnatural, echoing screech deafening all of them until with a last crack of thunder, she vanished and plunged the chamber into darkness.

"…_I-Is everyone alright?_" Ignitia's voice weakly panted out.

"I think I found a torch!" Torrdonal proclaimed. There was a slight whoosh and a bloom of amber light, revealing where Corrinthol had lit the discarded sconce held in Torrdonal's claw. "Are you okay, Corrinthol?"

"I-I think so." The flame dragon stuttered, his ankles shivering and clacking together.

"I can't feel my legs…" Spyra grumbled, limping down a stair flight to stand beside Ignitia. "…_Actually,_ I don't think I can feel my _anything._ Must mean I'm not that hurt or I'm near death. How do I look?"

Ignitia grimaced at the bloodied expression on the purple dragon's face.

"…It's nothing medical treatment won't fix." She supportively grinned.

"Aw hell, is it that bad?" Spyra spat blood and rubbed at her eye, hissing when she touched it. "_It's that bad._"

"_No!_"

They all looked at the Fallen, who was knelt over Morinth on the other side of the chamber. Spyra gasped, and all the other dragons hobbled over with haste.

"What's wrong with her-?" Spyra saw Morinth's belly hanging open, like a crimson, leathery flap pouch left ajar. "-_Fallen, use the injection things!_"

"….I…" The Fallen heaved as he held up one of the regen-injectors. It was empty. "…I'm all out."

"Oh no, nonononono…" Ignitia scrambled to lean over Morinth and press a paw over her ribs. The black dragoness looked serenely at rest, and did not even twitch. The Guardian mumbled some words, and soon tiny ribbons of amber energy were swirling around Morinth's body. "...h-healing spell…" –She blubbered when some of them looked on in confusion. "…_Morinth… you need to wake up, Morinth._"

Spyra sat on the ground and started chewing on a talon. Morinth's face was so calm for how her body looked, streamed with cuts, bruises and her own blood. Her beautiful gunmetal belly was gaping, her dark wings draped like old parchment, her emerald eyes sealed behind black lids. She wondered how someone normally so cheery could so... _so_...

The Fallen tripped as he tumbled back, the injector tinkling away on the ruined stone. He could do nothing but grip his own head and stare as the blood puddle started to leak around all the other dragons' paws.

Ignitia ignored it, her forepaws glistening with Morinth's life as she tapped at the dragoness' snout, tears falling from her in rivers.

"_Morinth!_" She screamed.

….Nothing happened.

Torrdonal gagged and ran away. Corrinthol was staring at a wall, his face unreadable. Ignitia looked like a statue, frozen in a hunched pose over the limp, dark form of Morinth's slender body, whispers of begging even leaving her in the developing stillness.

The Fallen couldn't take his eyes off her, only doing so when he noticed Spyra shivering directly beside him. Bloodied herself, and completely covered in lacerations, the purple dragon tried to contain herself as long as possible, to look strong, as she bit her chops raw.

Finally, with a strangled cry she threw herself into the Fallen's chest and started sobbing. That was the only thing ringing in his ears, the horrid gasps of his dragon, and the trickling whisper of Morinth's blood filling all the gaps in the floor.

_Ah yes, there it was. The repeating pattern of a portaljumper who gets involved with the locals._

_Pain._

_Lust._

_Joy._

_Difficulty._

Loss.

* * *

{🐉}


	24. Chapter 23 - Flight

**Dragon(s)layer**

**23**

* * *

**Flight**

* * *

"Oh, there you are. They said you were taking a nap, I wasn't sure if you were still asleep." Lightnux chuckled as he buzzed through the foyer nook. "You didn't have to sleep on the floor like that, we could have gotten you another nest."

Taliopia realized that she didn't understand what the dragonfly was saying. So, shaking her head, the poor medic could only cough and rub her snout tenderly, nodding at him and just hoping he would go away.

"Well, it isn't a big deal, we're happy to host you all. This village hasn't had visitors from the North before, in all its time. We're actually writing history this moment." Lightnux hummed, making conversation as he fixed a little thimble-sized cup of tea. "When me and the scribes finally get down to completing the next totem stack in the Mayfly Shrine, I'm quite sure you, your friends and Spyra certainly are going to be all over it, from top to bottom. A high honor."

"…_Oh, y-yeah… it… it sounds it…_" Taliopia scrunched her eyes open and closed a few times and swept her snout around the thicket. "-W-What time is it?"

"Early afternoon." The dragonfly sipped his cup.

"_What? _But- But the expedition- _Morinth-!_" Taliopia leaped unsteadily to her feet, leaning a wing on the bramble wall when she couldn't stand. "-_she left without me!_"

"It's quite alright! Your Wingleader said that they would be back within the hour, it was just to check on the wreckage of this tower you all are speaking of." Lightnux held his palms up for calm. "Morinth came in to check on you before she left. She's a very sweet soul, really beaming all the time."

"_Hah, yeah… that's my Morri-poo..." _ Taliopia swallowed her own chuckle, looking at the little dragonfly awkwardly. "…Mr. Spyra's Dad-"

"Just Lightnux is fine."

"…_Right,_ uhm… d-did Spyra… go on the trip too?"

"Of course, she wouldn't let them leave until her and her Fallen friend were ready." Lightnux scratched his mandibles. "Come to think of it, I didn't see the Fallen go to sleep in one of the thickets last night… _Bah,_ it's no issue. I was exhausted, Spyra had to carry me and Cometcu to our own nest, haha."

"…Yeah, he must've gone to… to _another_ thicket, and not Spyra's nest at all-" Taliopia bit her tongue and quickly started to limp outside. "I need some air, excuse me, Mr. Spyra's Dad…"

* * *

{🐉}

Taliopia shoved a fist in her mouth when she became too loud. She could never really help it. Her and Morinth usually were… _noisy,_ it was why they had had to stay away from each other for so long when they went to the academy.

That, and because professor Cyrila separated their dorm rooms after enough people complained for the Guardians to put two and two together. At least Ignitia had been kind enough to say it wasn't done because they were both females, but for professional reasons.

Inappropriate behavior on school grounds, or something like that.

Good thing the swamp wasn't school property.

Taliopia squeaked around her talons as she climaxed all over her paw, weakly sagging against the wall she had hidden behind.

She was in the rear of Spyra's thicket, just underneath her room nook's window. Taliopia had chosen the spot because the heavy stench of mating was still wafting out of the room and it turned her on.

Though with the feeling of relief came a whole bunch of complicated questions.

The _Fallen…_

Taliopia whined as she wiped herself off on one of her shapely white scaled thighs. She had never been interested in males before.

But then again, Taliopia had never _seen_ a male naked before either…

The Fallen was quite developed.

She slapped her chops, cleared her throat and preened her wings to try and focus on anything but her own heavy blush.

_Stop it, Tali', what would Morri-poo think if you were looking at other people?_

Actually, Taliopia had to pause as she staggered back around the thicket in a daze. Her and Morinth had been talking a lot the last few nights about the very subject in question.

"The Fallen's a cheeky chap, I like him." Morinth had said in their thicket as they groomed one another. "He's really got his head into getting back to the north and ramping up this war. He's a warrior, actually. He told me by the banquet baskets earlier."

"Sure, he really knows how to fight." Taliopia shyly uttered as she nibbled on Morinth's wingtip. "…and he is kinda' _cute_, for an alien…"

Morinth was silent for a minute, and Taliopia stopped teething, lifting her head to look her mate in the eyes.

"Morri-poo? I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"_Nonono,_ it's all good my _loovveee~…_" Morinth licked her snout. "…I know what you mean, it's just a compliment, nothing more and… _yes,_ he is quite… _cute._"

The medic sighed.

Her and Morinth would have to have a long talk when they got to Warfang…

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: The Movie OST: Heaven's Tide}**_

* * *

Grasping at strings of hope normally wasn't productive. But the Fallen couldn't help himself. The last few days had been messy.

_Just maybe, against all odds…_

The pods.

Tearing from Spyra had been the most difficult part of it, and walking past Ignitia, who had no idea what to do. He felt shitty for abandoning them with the baggage. But if there was any small amount of _hope,_ it was out here, not down there.

"I'm coming back." He had said.

"_-D-Don't leave-!_" Spyra had begged.

He couldn't listen to her and it was killing him more than climbing through all the rubble. Physical exertion was nothing to him, but seeing all the signs of his prior work was enough to elicit a pained grunt or two.

Now that he was examining Forlorn's remains more closely, he could see them. Apes, Giant Anteaters, Dreadwings. Lots of them, all crushed, dismembered, popped like grapes, intestines spilled everywhere…

Luckily the collapse had been so total that most of the carnage and viscera had been completely buried.

But luckily, his pods were still visible.

They had survived the sub-orbital impact when he had first come here, they could survive falling tens of stories through the crashing wreckage of Forlorn. They were two indestructible bulbs of lead among all the dusty rocks and strains of ruins. Each was surrounded by cracked, ancient stonework and smashed scrap. There wasn't a scratch on either of them.

_Almost there._ He hiked like mad, driving forwards until his muscles cramped, trekking the artificial slopes and hills, the wide view of Forlorn's wreckage sprawling around him, penned in with slabs of what parts of the massive atrium wall hadn't collapsed. _Just a little more._

The Fallen had to jump down an almost fifteen-foot drop. He grunted in pain and landed on the ramp (that had once been a wall) with an impact-defoliating roll.

Even as he moved, and horror filled his heart, he could actually feel the air itself changing. The darkness birthed deep inside the Forbidden Funguswood…

…it was receding.

The Fallen glanced over the mountains of death at the forest line penning in Forlorn's foundation in three directions. The darkness underneath the mushrooms was lessening. He could hear birds in the distance, and the croak of a frog.

Destroying the Pool had lifted a lot more than Malefora's corruptive gaze. Now he understood. That Pool had been a conduit for the Dark Continent to literally bleed into.

He was happy Ignitia had been the one to destroy it. She deserved that vengeance after all that had happened.

But Morinth didn't deserve death.

He had to stop this. He had to fight fate.

"You know what the odds are, right? That you actually _missed_ something in one of those pods?"

The Fallen ran right past Conscience when he appeared, sitting on the crumpled remains of a wagon that had been smashed.

"If you had sense, you'd let it go, man! You said it yourself-"

He appeared again standing at the top of a rubble summit.

"-_we needed to be prepared to see our new friends die!_"

-And again monkey-barring from a chute duct curling overhead like a black rainbow.

"Fallen, save who you still _can_ save and get the impossibilities out of your head. _Cynder_ would be a better goal to chase now…"

"_Fuck you._" The Fallen snarled, picking up the pace.

"Tell that to _them,_ old bean." Conscience was now running beside him, pointing at something.

The Fallen followed his finger, just in time to see the crossbow bolt coming right for him.

Sliding on the ball of his heel, he dipped his arm and let the round travel between the nape of his neck and his shoulder. It whizzed past and smacked into a brick.

The dodge- while effective –knocked him on his knee. Looking up, he was shown the visage of a black, red-armored and seven-foot-tall creature striding towards him over Forlorn's rubble.

The monster had a vaguely reptilian head, beady red eyes, a medium-sized tail and gnarly limbs each tipped with daggered claws and talon-toes. It had a compact handed crossbow in one hand and a dagger in the other, and it was moving with a lupine sort of grace, navigating the difficult terrain like it was nothing.

Flanking the creature was a handful of _Apes,_ ones marked with Visigoth's gray tribal attire. They hooted as they climbed, lagging behind their leader by a longshot.

The Fallen grimaced, his body still screaming at him from the fight with Malefora. Without those regen-injectors, any injuries he suffered were permanent, and reliant on his own healing. If he broke a bone or fractured something, he was done for.

Moving, he ducked behind a strain of rubble and let a few more crossbow rounds clink off the stone. The squad leader raspily grunted at the Ape sharpshooters in the band, waving his claw and patting at his shoulders and knees.

_Wounding shots only._

The Fallen wasn't a fool, he could read that.

Why did this thing want him alive? Malefora certainly hadn't sent them with orders like that, she wanted him and Spyra dead. So that only left…

_Cynder._

She must have sent for help before Forlorn had been destroyed. He was confident in that, especially after their _talk_ last night. At least they'd gotten to a point where Cynder was after him for _him,_ and not just to mind-break him and use his body.

_Though, the _using_ part I don't necessarily mind…_

The Fallen popped out from cover with his own crossbow, and the line snapped as a bolt flicked out. One of the Apes cartwheeled with little fletching jutting from his face. He reloaded and was able to kill another one before the rest of the group closed distance.

_God damn it, and I'm so close._

Hissing, the first Ape to reach him was a burly officer with a cleaver and little forearm shield. The beast hooted at him and kicked sparks as it slashed, missed and hit a rise of rubble. The Fallen swept under his big arms, gutted him, and ran the Ape through the chin when he started to fall.

His pods were visible just ahead. The archer leader and his band had advanced around them.

Rolling off the corpse, he tucked over a ridge and escaped the manic hacks of some of the other Ape attackers. He landed on one and forced the monkey down to his knees before burying his blade through its eye.

_Small numbers… I bet these are some of the last of their tribe. We have them on their knees._

The Fallen killed with abandon as he hacked his way through the stringent mob of howling barbarians, his eyes remaining locked on the dormant pods.

The archer leader peppered him with crossbow rounds, all of which either missed or lodged in Apes (some dead and some not) that the Fallen appropriated as makeshift shields.

Blood spattered the ground as he sliced through his victim. The last Ape turned tail and tried to run. The Fallen chucked a hand ax from the hilt, letting it spin twice before it ended its flight in the Ape's back, felling him.

The pod was just a few feet away. His hand reached out to it-

The red armored creature landed in front of him and invaded his vision a second later. It snarled something in a tongue he couldn't understand, and flipped from heel to head, crashing a boot toe into the Fallen's chin to send him reeling.

He stumbled over a debris rise and grabbed up a stick of dynamite, snapping the fuse and tossing it over the hill. He waited for the device to go off with a **_whmmp~! _**–and then stormed through the dust.

_Where'd it go?_

The Fallen heaved as he stood in the scorched blast crater, eyes darting everywhere.

The archer had vanished, leaving only the dull howl of the coastal winds to bracket the rubble slopes. All the Ape corpses were still lying around. No body for the archer creature.

No body meant it wasn't dead. He needed to work fast.

The large pod wasn't his goal. He skirted around that one and journeyed for the smaller auxiliary pod lying in the debris next to it. Cynder must have been intending to study the things before Forlorn crashed. Only he knew that nothing she ever did would've gotten them open. These pods were constructed of a material even he didn't understand.

He felt around the smooth waist until he found the little hidden niche he'd used when Spyra was injured. The pod hissed as its surface unfolded, and hinged plates flowered open to reveal its blackened, padded interior, glistening in the grim gray light.

The Fallen swept his eyes around the pod's depths. There was an empty canteen, some discarded plastic ration wraps and…

_There._

Hidden, in the very back, under a pile of wrapper trash. A single regen-injector sat, a little cylinder of silver in the dark.

The Fallen delved inside the pod up to the hip. Then the archer creature landed behind him and attacked.

"-_No-!_" He barked, dark, sharp claws enclosing around his chest and hauling him back from the pod. He twisted in the taller monster's grip, steadying himself on the center of its plated chest, he hammered his elbow into its throat twice before the last blow saw the thing hack and toss him to the ground.

The Fallen scrambled as he dropped the blade he was holding. The archer's booted foot swept in, and before the human knew it, all he could hear was white noise as the heel slammed into his forehead and looped him onto his back painfully.

_That'll leave a mark._

"…_Slippery little thing…_" Zargos grumbled, his tail lashing as he paused a second to examine the sprawled _hoo-man_ lying before him. "Why Cynder wants you alive is beyond me. You're dangerous."

The Orc knelt, batting away the Fallen's hands. He gripped him by the hair and hoisted him up to hip-height, sending the human crashing back down with a full-fisted punch centered on the bridge of his nose. The blow echoed like a drum clap and the Fallen sprawled.

"Stay down." Zargos breathed, reaching into a little pouch on his belt, and producing the black pearl that Cynder had given him. He touched it, and within a moment, Cynder's face materialized in the center of a black cloud of dust rising from the pearl's heart. "M'lady…"

"_Zargos?_" Cynder sounded surprised, and quite strained through the pearl's little echo. He could hear the papery flap of her wings and the whip of sea-air. She was flying, evidently. "_Why do you contact me? What is wrong?_"

"…What is wrong…" Zargos sneered, glancing around himself at all the debris. "…is that I journeyed to find a thousand-year-old tower, and instead discovered a hill of rocks. I'm guessing the battle went poorly, my Mistress?"

"_Sarcastic jokes are not the way to get on my good side today, Pathfinder._"

"Then perhaps news that I have captured your _Fallen_ alive will suffice." Zargos held the pearl closer to the Fallen, who was holding his bleeding nose and staring hatefully up at the Orc.

"…_Fallen~…_" Cynder gasped, making Zargos blink at the level of sudden emotion in her voice. "_-D-Don't hurt him more than you must._"

"My Mistress, what is going on?" Zargos growled. "The Dark One wishes this creature dead. Her orders overrule yours."

"_Not if you wish to keep your head, Orc!_ _Restrain the Fallen and bring him aboard your ship! You'll be sailing him towards Concurrent where I will relieve you of him._"

"And what of the Purple Dragon? Where he is, she no doubt is as well? I cannot abandon the other part of my mission."

"_She isn't as important! Do as I say!_"

"Isn't as important." Zargos stared at Cynder's little reflection in the black mist. "The Purple Dragon is the prophesized ruination of our Dark Army."

"_Zargos, you are bound to my word and I am telling you that I will destroy your mind, then your body, and then your spirit if you fail to bring me that human! I. Want. Him. ALIVE._"

"I've been led to question your sound mind, _Mistress._" Zargos sneered. "The Dark One will be hearing of this. Consider our contract _modified._"

"_Zargos-!_"

He crushed the pearl into dust and sprinkled it onto the ground.

Treachery.

From _Cynder_ of all Malefora's champions…

Truly this was a time of apocalyptic ruination, Zargos now realized. There was only one way to deal with sedition. He slipped his dagger from his belt and immediately thrust it downwards for the human's belly-

-and found he had vanished.

Zargos froze, listening to the howling wind.

…._Whistling…. Whistling…._

_Crumble. South. Left foot._

The Orc vaulted on his heels, pinwheeling across the ground in an impressive display of acrobatics. The Fallen- frustrated –grunted as he landed in empty space, an ax he'd picked up clinking into the stone.

Zargos landed upright and snapped his crossbow to attention, now aiming for the Fallen's head. The human gasped, and purely by reaction, saved his own life, flinging his ax up before his face, the bolt sparked off the blade's flat and smacked the weapon out of his grip. Zargos started to reload, and the Fallen lunged.

He grappled the Orc across his lithe back and locked an arm around his throat, squeezing, tossing around as Zargos shook himself like a dog and pushed against the Fallen's stomach with the spine of his tail.

The Orc gripped him by the hair and swung him bodily over his shoulder, crashing the Fallen back-first into the ground. Zargos made to stamp on his face, but the Fallen rolled, and his heel cracked bare stone.

The Fallen barked in pain as he was forced to use his fists, punching Zargos across the helmet in three heavy blows that sent the Orc's reptilian head jerking in neck-breaking tosses. The Fallen skinned his knuckles, globules of his own blood flying everywhere as he beat Zargos back. A heel to his leg got the Orc to a half-kneel. The Fallen gripped the back of his head, and thrust Zargos forward in a rush of movement, slamming his forehead into the hard, metal rim of the pod's open hatch.

**_Clung~! _**–Zargos felt a tooth dislodge, and his own blood started to flow like a river underneath his helmet and down his snout. He bit the tip of his tongue off, and felt it leave his mouth on a bloody ream of spittle. His skull was reverberating and he had lost the ability to hear.

The Fallen chucked the Orc to the ground, snarled at him for a moment, and then delved inside the pod, scrambling for the regen-injection in the back.

_Yes._

Pulling out with his prize, the human blinked when he spun to finish the Orc off.

Zargos was gone, vanishing as easily as he had appeared.

* * *

{🐉}

"…This is my fault." Ignitia muttered. "I led you all down here because… because I thought _numbers_ would thwart any efforts Malefora put forth from the pool… and… and look at what I've done…"

Spyra didn't have the energy to try and console her. She had been crying too much, and had taken to defeatedly sprawling on the chamber floor, staring at Morinth's body.

_She looks like she's sleeping…_

Spyra rocked a little bit and tried to focus the mental chaos in her mind.

She had only known Morinth for a few days, but in that time, Spyra had become very attached to her. She was a friendly dragoness, a fellow female to spend time with, talk with, laugh with… her _and_ Taliopia.

"…_uhm…._" Spyra croaked like a frog, her voice hoarse from all the sobbing. She looked at Ignitia, who was hollow, and staring at the blood matting her umber paws with an empty expression on her face. "…_Ignitia…?_"

The Guardian didn't answer her.

"…_what do I tell T-Tali'….?_" Spyra hiccupped. "…_Ignitia? Please… I don't… I don't know what to say to her, please… just… just help me…_"

Ignitia stewed in silence for a moment before her chest started to heave in and out. Her eyes scrunched shut, and she slowly sank into her forepaws, quiet sobs wracking her spined back.

When she had a moment to breathe, it came out as a pained, shrill exhale that sounded around the chamber. Ignitia bawled and curled up on the floor, completely immobilized.

"…Me and her had it rough…" Corrinthol's voice crawled out from the dark. "…b-but I didn't… want her to…"

Torrdonal attempted to lay a wing over his back, but even in mourning, the haughty flame drake sneered and pushed him away with a growl.

"-_O-Once-_" Ignitia heaved, hiding her face pathetically inside her arms. "-_Once at the a-acade-my…. V-Volt _eer_-a t-told me… t-that she wanted to- to di-e-ee…_"

Spyra tried to crawl closer to her, but her legs felt numb. She growled and leaned against a fallen buttress, snarling down at the blood dripping from her mouth.

_Damned Dark Mistress really banged me up… She's tougher than she looks, even as a ghost-thing, whatever she was… _

"-_I-Ignitia… hold on a sec' there…_" She coughed. "_I'm comin' over…_"

"_N-Now-_" Ignitia heaved, crying: "-_I w-want to die t-too-_"

"Nobody's dying."

The Fallen swept into the room in a brisk run, hurrying over to Morinth's prone form. He had a regen-injector in his bloodied hands. Spyra gasped, seeing the horrific damage on his hands, his arms, and the blood leaking from his black and blue nose.

"-W-What happened to _you?_" She squawked. "Holy shit, can't any of us catch a break?"

"Ambushed." Was all the Fallen breathed, sticking the needle in Morinth's flank, and draining most of the blue liquid inside, a hand trailing down the still dragoness' cheek. She felt cold, like ice. "…God damn it, work. _Work._"

"_Wait-_" Spyra fell on her face as she tried to limp over, resorting to crawling, until she grabbed his thigh and hoisted herself against him. "-_d-don't drain all of it… y-you need it too-_"

The Fallen drained the tube until only a quarter remained. He slipped it out of Morinth, held the syringe up to Spyra's mouth.

"Fire." He sputtered.

Spyra winced and puckered her chops, coating the needle's tip with a small lighter-like cone of flame. The Fallen shook it, wiped it off, and then stuck it in Spyra's arm before she could protest.

"No." She gasped.

"_Yes._" He grunted.

Spyra doubled over as something snapped back into place inside her gut. Her eye began to lower in its swelling and she could see again. The blood stopped flowing in her mouth and her muscles began to feel relaxed.

"…_Fallen…_" She gripped his arm, squeezing, a look of panic on her snout. "what about you?"

"Forget me." He growled. "Not important."

Spyra wanted to punch him so badly for saying that. And she just might've had she not noticed Morinth's belly.

The flap of flesh hanging from her! It was… _restitching._

The Fallen quickly and gingerly laid a hand under the loose flesh-flap, easing it into place from where Malefora's wing-blade had peeled it from Morinth's torso. Soon, the black, gaping trench revealing some of Morinth's pink intestines began to become smaller, and smaller, and the blood stopped dribbling.

"_Ohmygod she's breathing…_" Spyra gripped Morinth's side, laughing as it started to weakly rise, and then fall.

"She's not out of the woods yet." The Fallen cringed as he rose to his feet, slipping his arms under Morinth's heavy frame, he barked as he fought against the pain and hoisted her in his arms. The black dragoness limply draped over his elbows like a dead fish, her tail dragging on the floor behind him. "Help me… get her outside… blood loss… need medicine…"

"I have her." Ignitia ducked under the Fallen's arm and slipped Morinth over her back, adjusting until she was properly affixed. Spyra marveled at her, tear-stained and puffy-eyed, Ignitia mustered every bit of strength she had left to take back command. "Torrdonal, Corrinthol, are either of you injured seriously?"

"N-No, Wingleader. Some cuts, bruises, but…" Torrdonal stood at attention.

"Go outside and canvass the area, start heading back to the dragonfly village and prepare for our arrival with Morinth." Ignitia nodded at the Fallen and Spyra. "Spyra, you'll be our escort, and Fallen, when we get airborne you're riding with Morinth in your lap."

"…C-Can you _handle_ that?" The Fallen blinked.

"I must, so it shall be done." Ignitia said.

Traversing the steps, up out of the hallways and through the ruined chute cap, daylight streamed from outside and briefly blinded the dragonesses and the human.

But as he limped ahead of them, blade at the ready, in case Zargos returned, the Fallen saw a shadow in the light, and raised his axe to counter the offender.

"-_Get behind me!_" He hollered, rearing back to swing, when-

"_Stop! _Fallen, it's us! We are allies!"

"-_H-Harad…?_"

The Fallen fell on his knees and dropped his weapon, lazily looking up at a large dragon that he initially thought was the Captain, as, he had heard General Ass-Pole's voice…

But this dragon was… _different._

He was dark navy blue, with bronze horns, plates of silvery armor with dragon designs and lightning bolts carved into them layering his breast, back and shoulders. He was staring at the Fallen with a look of an almost childish intrigue.

"_That's_ a _hoo-man?_" The dragon gasped.

"W-Who the _fuck _are you?" He slurred, feeling his world spin as he grabbed the ground and looked about.

There were dragons.

_Tens of them,_ of all shapes, sizes and colors, all wearing silvery Warfangian armor.

"_Wingleader!_" –And Harad was _still_ the biggest of all of them as he barreled through the ranks towards them. "What happened?"

Torrdonal was following close on his heels, yet another panicked rant leaving his chops, statements about an evil killer pool, the Dark Mistress killing everyone and the tenacity of water.

Harad ignored him and weighed a shoulder into Ignitia as she came trudging out with Morinth slapped over her back like a used wet-rag.

"…_Captain… back so soon…_" Ignitia smiled, sniffling. "Morinth has suffered extreme blood loss and needs immediate aid…"

"Take her, quickly." Harad nodded for a pair of dragons in the group, a light blue and a yellow one, who hurried over and slipped Morinth onto their backs. "Are there any other injuries?"

"The Fallen!" Spyra cried, and the whole crowd of dragons stared at her with a collective gasp.

"The Purple Dragon!" Someone breathed.

"It's true, the stories…"

"She's real..."

Spyra ignored them and slid the Fallen's arm over her shoulders. He looked like he was ready to pass out.

"You idiot!" She sobbed. "Why didn't you use the _injector on yourself?!_"

"…not… as _important…_" The Fallen snatched the empty vial off his hem, and tossed it on the ground like it was a piece of litter. Spyra started to cry again.

Harad- moved by what he was hearing –lifted the human onto his back himself, and nodded for the medical team.

"This one too. But be _careful,_ he's… _delicate._ Think of treating a really tall, thin Mole."

* * *

{🐉}

When he awoke, he found that he could taste his own pain. And he didn't fancy it one bit.

_Ouch._

The Fallen grit his teeth as he attempted to sit up, his eyes rolling in his head as reality slowly bled back into his senses. His back was on fire. So were his hands. His legs and arms were aching, like he'd been constantly moving them without rest for the last week, and his head was spinning whilst also being gripped by a horrible headache.

_Ouch._

He brought a hand up to his face, freezing when he caught sight of his own palm. It was white. Not his skin tone white, _sheet white._ Bandages, affixed in a firm wrappage.

Both of his hands were like that, with his fingers poking out and wriggling from each cast. Bandages formed a loop over his thin chest, around both of his arms, and even around the bridge of his nose. He felt awkwardly around his face, realizing that someone had made little eye-holes for him in a completely sealed mask of dressings, ones going from his upper lip to his cranium.

_Ouch._

He hissed when he pressed on his nose in a little testing push. It was probably broken, or at least fractured. Without regen-injections, he'd have to tough it out, just like with the rest of the dressings.

He'd been through worse.

Trying once again to sit up flared all kinds of fiery shit in his chest. He gave off a loud- '_Hooooo…._' –at the stinging discomfort, scrunching his eyes closed as he waited for the pain to lapse. When it got a little better, he blinked and tried to take in his surroundings.

At least everything was in its normal place. Spyra's room nook looked as prim as ever, freshly organized too since earlier this morning. The nesting he was lying had been changed and some clean furs had been added. The toiletries basket was in order, Spyra's soap bars, her toothbrush and the scale ointment she'd shown him…

Wait…

He did a double-take. Then, he raised his hand and pointed at the arch frame, then himself, and then at the little window as if someone was there to observe and provide elaboration.

_What in all that is mighty? _–He mouthed, craning his bandaged head about. He checked past his stomach when something shifted, and _someone_ snorted.

Briefly freezing, he relaxed when he saw a purple dragoness draped exhaustively over his exposed stomach, her puffy eyes closed and little breaths leaving her snout.

_At least that's something I know pretty well._

Idly scratching her behind one of her golden horns, he painfully chuckled when she slapped her chops and leaned into the touch in her sleep. Her tail coiled over his leg and her wings had become a makeshift blanket.

If he didn't feel like he'd been trampled by an elephant and summarily shit on by a passing rhinoceros, this would've been pretty dang nice.

But he had to wonder…

Were they all dead? Or had someone actually found them?

"-_Oi-! I gotta get in dere! My master's in there, and the purple drag! They spared my bloody life, yu know, I gots a right to see em! Patient confidentiality and whatnot. Bugger! Get outta my way-!_"

…_No,_ they weren't dead.

Unless they were in hell.

Given his record, that certainly was a possibility. But Spyra wouldn't have been there, so no, this couldn't have been hell.

A commotion grabbed his attention as something jolted into the nook frame, nearly collapsing on its hands and knees just ahead of the nesting.

"-_Bloody ell,_ how's anybody supposed ta navimigate these tight little nooks with any comfort? I know it's fer bugs and whatnot but this ain't convenient in da slightest."

Palmet tugged at his jaw, his eyes locking with the Fallen's as his complaining rant drabbled off.

"-Great ancient monkeys!" Palmet shrieked, making the poor Fallen wince.

"_Headache._" He weakly croaked, but the Ape didn't hear him.

"My master's been turned into a bloody _mummy!_" Palmet gripped at his mane in panic. "I can't believe it! I ain't servin no undead scrabblah! Now I'm on the market again…"

"_Palmet._" The Fallen wheezed. "S-_s…_"

"Master? You can still speak? Mummies can't speak… _oh! _So you aren't a mummy then? Fantastic, that one, I was terrified fer a moment there that you'd spring up all jolly and such and start scribblin high-ro-glifficks on the nook wall…"

"_Palmet. S-s…._s…"

"Aye, tell me, Master, I'm right 'ere!" Palmet leaned a little closer, making Spyra snort in her sleep as a slight snore started to drone from her nose. "Say again? You want me to rub ya feet or something? I can make yer hospitally stay so much bettah, believe yu-me-"

The Fallen snatched Palmet's mane scruff and yanked the Ape closer.

"_Shut. Up. Please._" He croaked.

"…Oh." Palmet blinked, stepping back when the Fallen let him go. "Y-Yeah, sure thing, boss. Ehm… h-how's them head of yours?"

"Pounding." The Fallen growled. "What happened?"

"Well, yu lot got picked up by a whole party of Warfang lads and lasses who brought ya back to the village and are waitin for you to get up so we can all leave." Palmet jammed a thumb at the arch. "There are dese two soldier-types out there with the absolutely _crappiest_ sense-a companionship, unrightly. I had to hem and holler to dat angry guy, _Haragon,_ or Harrimomey, or whatever the blimey his name was… they wouldn't leh me in ta see ya otherwise!"

"I can't imagine why. I'm surprised no one tried to kill you."

"Oi, course they tried ta kill me, but then that Ignitia lass jumped in and saved my tail at the last min. Fast lady-drag that one is."

"_She _vouched for you?"

"Yeah, said I was _important tu ya._" Palmet interlocked his fingers, and his eyes sparkled. The Fallen cringed. "Am I really dat meaningful to ya, boss? Aw, c'mere and give ole Palms a hug-"

"_Step back, or I will slice off your testicles._" The Fallen snatched one of his stolen Ape blades that had been left with the rest of his gear by Spyra's nest side. "…But I'm glad you're alright, butler."

"Aye, likewise, Master." Palmet wrung his palms together. "…_Ehm,_ there's some peepol out dere waitin ta see yah too, I'm kinda on a bit of a timer ere."

"Who else?"

"Well, dat medical type drag with the rosey wings an eyes for starters, and the fire lass."

"So send in the first one." The Fallen painfully leaned back, drumming his fingers on the back of Spyra's neck. She started to merge her light snoring with a slight purr. "And see if you can get me a pitcher of that amber-beer, I'm parched."

"Aye! Eager ta serve ya, Master!" Palmet clapped his paws, making him wince. "Off rightly then I go! _Oh- _ya want anyfing else while I'm about?"

"No, really it's-"

"How about a nice side of some of them _salamander jerkeys?_ Ooo! Or what about a few pairs of apples, or pairs-a_-pears! Ha! _A little fruit based humah fer ya. I can also find ya a warm towelz or whatnot, or a fresh set of socks! Though, wait… I don't gots any socks… Yu know where I can get some socks, Master? Meep could use some small size-"

"_Palmet._"

"-Right, right, off I go…"

The Fallen rolled his eyes when Palmet grinned one last time and vanished out the arch.

Guy was a load to deal with.

But, menial labor was done when he was on the job.

He'd never say no to a pack mule, especially when Corrinthol wasn't available.

Spyra snored loudly and adjusted on his stomach, rubbing her face on him a few times like a cat would. He marveled at how she was actually asleep through this whole thing. He wondered if all young dragons in this realm were this lazy…

**_Knock-knock_**

"-Yep." He called over. The Fallen's heart leaped when the white scaled, timid, slender form of Taliopia silently slipped in from the hall nook outside.

The medic paused in the frame for a second, her rosy eyes scanning the nesting- as if she was just _checking_ this time –before she smiled nervously and sat on her haunches in the nook's corner, curling her tail and wings protectively over herself.

"…. Uh…. H-Hey, Taliopia." The Fallen waved cheaply. Taliopia smiled again and waved back.

"Hello." She said lowly, pointing at Spyra and mouthing: "_Is she asleep still?_"

"Don't worry about it." He said in his normal voice, grabbing one of her horns and wiggling her to demonstrate. Spyra's snore jostled in volume. "See? Out like a light."

"How are you feeling?"

"Like Spyra set me on fire."

"I'm sorry, me and the other medics did the best we could…"

"You did a wonderful job. I could be feeling _dead._" The Fallen grinned, before his expression turned serious. "Morinth? How is she?"

"S-She-" Taliopia's jaw quivered. She put a claw over her mouth, and took a deep breath before smiling. "-they think she's going to be okay."

The Fallen sighed and deflated into the nesting.

"…_thank god…_" He muttered. "…I thought… _nevermind what I thought._ I'm glad."

"The others were saying you saved her life." Taliopia scooted closer to the nesting, her rose-colored eyes locking on his face with a deep sort of expression. "You healed my Morri-poo instead of yourself, and Spyra too. They said you got attacked by _Malefora herself. _B-But that can't be true… she's…"

"It's half true." He grimly nodded. "We were attacked by a magical aspect of her. She's very powerful. She nearly killed all of us."

"-_*snorreee-*_ -_ehm-w-wha….?_" Spyra licked her chops and groggily sat up, looking at the Fallen as a stupid grin crawled up her snout. "…_hey,_ you're awake… and you look like a tree that got toilet-papered."

"Funny." He cupped her chin and looked back at Taliopia. "Am I good enough to walk?"

"You'll be sore for a few days, and it'll be difficult for you to stand, and sit down, and walk and-" She paused. "-it'll be _hard_ for a week or so. But when we get to Warfang, we can use healing potions on you to accelerate the process and make you all better!"

"You're a miracle worker, Taliopia." He chuckled. "Thank you."

"N-No, I need to be thanking you, Mr. Fallen, I…" Taliopia leaned over, and in full view of Spyra, chanced a little lick on the Fallen's cheek. "…you saved Morinth. I don't know if I could live knowing something happened to her. You save her life, you save mine."

The Fallen didn't know what to say. This was probably the deepest he'd ever witnessed the medic acting.

Taliopia blinked and quickly sat back, cupping over her snout.

"Everyone else is waiting for you." She smiled, looking playful. "When we get to Warfang, I'm gonna' buy you a stuffed animal as a thankyou present! 'Kay?"

"'Kay." He winked. She giggled, blushed, and scampered from the room, before her head poked back in and she said. "-A-And about what I saw earlier…"

Him and Spyra froze up.

"…It's, uhm… I kind of… _didn't mind and…_" Taliopia's blush was furious. "I'll let myself out. See you later, Spyra?"

"Count on it, babe'." Spyra winked. "So, _you,_ you feel good enough to walk?"

"I feel like someone dropped bricks on my kneecaps and shot me through a wind tunnel." He grumbled.

"What happened when you got back to the surface?"

"I got ambushed by this creature leading a pack of Apes, some kind of assassin sent by Cynder. I overheard that his name was Zargos, and that he's a Pathfinder. I killed his Apes, kicked his can and sent him packing. But I didn't get a chance to finish him off."

"Just another douchebag to add to the list." Spyra sighed happily, nosing his naval. "I'm glad yer' alright, Fallen."

"Worried much?" He grinned like an asshole. Spyra clicked her tongue and tossed one of the nest furs at him. "You don't have to stay here with me, Spyra, I can manage."

"You sure?"

"Spyra, how long have you been here?"

"Since they brought you in, like… an hour or two ago."

"Go get some fresh air."

"…Yeah, sure." Spyra sat up and stretched, making sure to show him under her tail as she sauntered for the door. He reached out and slapped her backside before she got out of range. "-_Rawr-! _Quit it, dude! Wasn't today enough already? We almost died."

When he only giggled at her, she rolled her eyes and passed through the frame.

"Don't spend all day in there, you'll atrophy." She called.

Ignitia appeared outside the nook window after a little while, her usual, matronly smile on her snout.

"Hello, Fallen." She said, snaking her neck through the window and bowing just over the nest.

"How's it going?" He sat up and started to flex his arms and legs. "…This actually isn't as bad as I thought… it still hurts like hell, but… it's doable."

"Very good. I-I hope you don't mind me saying, but I was terrified about Morinth…" She paused. "and about you. Everything is in working order?"

"Everything's where it's supposed to be." He stood up from the nest, leaning on her offered horn until he could balance. "Warfang?"

"We're leaving the moment you're ready." Ignitia nodded. "The Wings Harad recruited brought riders saddles, for all the Moles, and for that _Ape_ of yours… But there is also a saddle for you as well."

"_Ah._" The Fallen tugged on his jumpsuit, noticing that it had been cleaned. "So who's the lucky dragon I get to give back problems?"

"Me." Ignitia clicked her tongue.

"_…_Ignitia, you don't have to-"

"I volunteered. Now prepare all of your gear, say your goodbyes to the dragonflies and get ready to leave immediately. The war has waited long enough." Ignitia slipped back out the window, noting to him in passing: "We can further discuss _personal matters,_ Fallen, once we have the proper quartering in Warfang."

The Fallen paused mid-yank of his boot, and stared at her through the window.

Ignitia blushed, but kept a straight face.

"Just move with haste, will you?"

"Yes ma'am."

She trotted off.

The Fallen shook his head and grinned, wincing as his muscles complained.

Today had sure been one hell of a trip.

* * *

{🐉}

Spyra spent a long time with Cometcu, Firefly and Lightnux. The Fallen couldn't hear many words exchanged between them. But in the end, the purple dragoness had touched foreheads with both of them for what felt like hours, before separating, and taking her place in a row of dragons beside Ignitia. He didn't mention anything about the tear she quickly wiped away with her wing.

"What're you lookin' at, punks?" She sneered at a cluster of dragon soldiers who were gawking. They startled and immediately turned around, even though some of them were twice her size. The Fallen chuckled, adjusting the securities on his dragon-saddle secured over Ignitia's back.

It was designed for a Mole. He was a little oversized in the thing, but it would do, he was thin enough.

"How checks everything, Fallen?" Ignitia asked, curling her neck around to inspect his legs and lap.

"Everything is green." He held onto the rider's bar, giving it a little yank experimentally. "So… we're flying over an _ocean?_"

"Yes."

"From extreme heights?"

"The Wing will be ascending for roughly a few minutes, but flight will be consistently maintained at 1500 feet throughout the majority of the trip. We'll begin descending once we pass the sanctioned port of Beacon to a much lower terrestrial level until we reach the walls. So, yes. From good heights certainly."

"Alright." He nodded.

"Nervous?"

"I'm always nervous. But it isn't the first time I've done something like this." The Fallen grinned, noticing several of the Warfangian soldiers around him staring. He winked at a dark blue, black underbellied dragoness, and chuckled when she shuddered and quickly turned away, struggling to not peak back at him. "I've learned the best way to conquer fear is to smile at it."

"Apt advice." Ignitia extended her great wing length and gave them a little flush. "Hopefully, you won't have to smile too long at _this._"

"I wish I was carrying you." Spyra glumly remarked, though, it did little to hide her anxiousness. She was giddy, rocking in place and constantly glancing around.

Her first _Wingflight._ With other dragons.

Spyra was vibrating.

Behind the organized rows of Warfanging dragons, the entire dragonfly village had gathered in a colorful crowd to see them off.

The Fallen could pick out Lightnux, Cometcu and Firefly in the front of the gathering, three lights shining in the marsh. He raised a hand to them and nodded. Only Lightnux responded in kind.

"You've promised to defend my daughter with your life?" Lightnux had asked him earlier as he was preparing his gear.

"Many times. So far, I haven't failed, and I have been tested." He assured, clamping his crossbow to his back belt. "I wouldn't be bringing Spyra to this war if she wasn't needed."

"I believe you." Lightnux nodded. "No other thing but fate would see you and her linked in such a way. What was meant to be was meant to be."

"Goodbye, Chieftain. I will bring your daughter back to you."

"_Are all passengers secure?_" One of the soldiers called out. Most of the Wing had saddles of their own, filled with one to two Moles each. A few confirmatory barks sounded out. "Take flight when ready!"

"Arrowhead formation." Harad's deep voice came from the front of the Wing. The Fallen could see him meet eyes with him and Ignitia over the rows of horns and wings briefly. "Un-saddled are at the forefront and rear. Fly fast."

Nearby, a larger medic had Morinth strapped into her own saddle. The tired-looking half-breed dragoness was slumped, but visibly awake.

She looked over at the Fallen, and weakly smiled, blinking her brilliant emerald eyes at him. He felt lightened at her appearance. She was okay.

Taliopia, Corrinthol and Torrdonal were arranged behind Ignitia and getting ready as well. Taliopia was the only one saddled, carrying a young Mole female and her infant swaddled in a blanket. The medic shyly met his gaze and blushed.

"_Here we go._" Spyra kept repeating to herself. "_Here we go._"

"Hold on." Ignitia muttered to him.

The first rows of dragons started to lift off the ground. The Fallen blinked, astonished. They were so… _fast,_ but graceful.

Tens of dragons, darting up into the sky to create a blackened flock sailing over the treeline ahead, Harad at their forefront, his mighty wings bucking.

The dragons ahead of Ignitia shot off the ground, and the Fallen felt his knuckles going white as he gripped the bar tighter.

_This is it._

Spyra zipped into the air with a little wiggle of her hips, whooping as she shot through the atmosphere like a bullet. The Fallen felt Ignitia's back flex, and his weight bottomed out in his heels and backside.

_Up, up, wind and breeze…_

Ignitia's wings flapped again, and again, and soon air was tickling his black hair. The Fallen held on tight and chanced a look past his knee, seeing his restrained foot over the blurry, gradually shrinking landscape below.

The dragonfly village got smaller and smaller, until he could no longer see it, hidden in the trees.

For the first time since he had arrived here, the swamps began to flow away from him forever. The giant mushrooms, the willow trees and that horrid morning stink…

_There it all goes._

The dragons were like a flight of gliding, scaly birds. Their wing membranes quivered in the upkick, and their eyes were narrowed behind silver helmets, limbs tucked to their bellies to form themselves like arrows zipping through and through.

Spyra was in the middle of it, divided by fresh sky from him. She was smiling, her orange wings flapping excitedly as she glanced around at all the soldiers.

Ignitia tipped her neck forwards and fell into a glide with the rest of the flight. The Fallen hunkered lower in his saddle, fighting against the wind hitting his eyes.

The gray sky above contrasted the darker shades of the world below. They passed the River of Amber, now nothing but an orange little string winding through the heavy foliage. They passed the ruins of the Dragon Temple, which he noted Ignitia's nose briefly tracking. They passed the crumbled remains of Forlorn, tan and minute from this height. A small shape sat, lonely on the beach, the blackened pill-shaped corpse of the beached _Hail Digger_ that the Moles had washed up in. The Fallen couldn't imagine many of them were sad to see the ordeal behind them.

Finally, they passed the immense ruins of Stormwatch, which he stared at until the coast started to shrink behind them.

The Fallen curled his back as best as his injuries and the dressings would allow. He watched the Southern Marshes as they became a hairs length line running the ocean's gambit, and soon it vanished in the gray expanse of the waters below.

Little did he know that Spyra's swampy home would never be seen by his eyes again.

* * *

{🐉}


	25. Chapter 24 - Surviving with Dark Towers

**Dragon(s)layer**

**24**

* * *

**Surviving with Dark Towers**

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning Soundtrack: Tall Plains}**_

* * *

Jute couldn't remember the last time he had frowned for this long. Frowning was an expression he detested. His nature was always calling for him to take even catastrophic losses with a hearty air of levity, no matter what.

The death of Visigoth was too lofty, however, for even _him_ shrug off. Jute was so deeply impacted, that his facial features changed, and he became a pale white underneath his brownish fur.

Charlee, Jute's prized Dreadwing, had been bonded to him for so long, that an unnatural connection had been born between their minds. When Jute felt pain, so did the Dreadwing, and likewise. Jute's defeated demeanor speared not only his own soul, but his mount's. The beast was uncharacteristically quiet the entire flight.

Jute's fur flowed in the wind like brown fire, and the feathers and fronds decorating his body whipped in the current. He cast an empty gaze at his flanks, harboring the pit in his guts as he recalled that he was flying back _alone._

His entire flight of Dreadwings.

All gone, crushed or blasted to pieces with the rest of Cynder's tower. There was no getting away from it now.

Sure, he had more Dreadwings, but his tribe had never suffered a loss before where over _sixty_ of them had died in a single battle.

_Sixty._

Numbers like that took years to amass. Grim as he was, his economical sageness wormed its way to his forethought and did make him wonder: just how long would it take his Apes to recover from this?

The Frontier Sea was a gray blanket below, matching the dreary clouds above. Charlee's sole screech of the entire ride echoed up and down both vertices of colorless mirth.

Jute took up the reigns and double-wrapped them around his wrists. Eerily, the division between the water and the sky began to blur as a heavy blanket of fog materialized. The sea now resembled an oceanic graveyard.

Jagged rocks made low formations in the waves, and the roar of crashing water was solemnly pitched. The first island slid out of the fog as if hoping to ambush him and his mount. The island was a cliff rise, a cylindrical protrusion of vegetation-capped stone. Jute swerved Charlee lazily to the side and slipped around the foothill island's waist.

The islands became common after that. There were mazes of them, creating a formation that forced Jute to weave back and forth, avoiding wicked cliffs, suspended plateaus overgrown with tropical plants and low-hanging bushes of green vines.

_Tall Plains._

His tribe's new home.

A large plateau was his destination. Charlee banked his ragged wings into a dive, flapping to steady and land heavily.

Jute sighed with some measure of relief. The lukewarm, plush feel of the grass on his feet was a beautiful thing, especially after he'd spent days tramping in swamp muck and waddling on old, dingy drag-stone.

Bird calls and insect croaks were thick on the air, blending with the oceanic wallops of the waves battering against the maze of islands' feet.

Nobody knew how many of the islands there were in total. Jute ran a few numbers in his head, and for some reason kept pulling up _seventy-two._ It was something like that. The Northern presence in Tall Plains had been pitiful, as most of the islands had belonged to the native Llama tribesmen before Jute had stormed the islands with his Dreadwing flights and line-dropped infantry. The Llamas had been the smarter of the two opponents. They surrendered as soon as they saw the bat-wings flapping in the sky.

The little Mole outpost had been a different story, one bloodier. Jute had lost over thirty men just to drive the Moles out, where they fled on a pair of steamships. One had beached west of Stormwatch, and its people had been captured by Visigoth's tribe. The other had most likely made it back to Beacon, or some other port. It meant that this time of quiet occupation was limited, and soon the dragons would come, wrathful and very displeased.

Jute didn't fear common dragons. He _did_ fear the Purple Dragoness and the _hoo-man._ Especially after what he had seen them do.

Charlee drew close and nudged Jute with his helmet. The Chieftain muttered some meaningless praise and stroked the Dreadwing's mane.

"Aye, don't let them tethers strangle ya none there, lads." Jute snorted, glancing under Charlee's massive shoulder. "…It's just over the top… down the loop… oh, come now, I know yu aren't _that_ dense… there!"

There was a pained gasp and the ruffle of a pair of bodies dropping onto the grass.

"Wuz that so hard?" Jute chanced a half-hearted grin. _Ancient monkeys, he didn't even feel alive right now… He didn't feel like himself._

" _Hard?_ I must address this with a complaint!" Tinker snarled, feeling around the grass for his monocle, and giving up halfway. "There was a perfectly functioning saddle, _why not allocate it for an express multi-passenger purpose?!_"

"Gigaw chosen Orderly of Mistress! Gigaw deserve better!" The Grublin's shrill voice made Charlee growl, the massive beast's mane quivering with the tone of its displeasure. Gigaw went very still, claws spread out as he avoided touching the Dreadwing's paler colored belly. "…Gigaw not mean _offense…_"

"Blimey, you Grublins: so many rocks in your birthplaces, and you still couldn't take two of them to use them as a pair of balls." Tinker snarled, rolling between Charlee's foot and wingjoint. "Now about that _saddle, _my chap_…_"

"No one else sits on me bloody saddle, because _I'm _Chieftain, and _I_ say ya can't ride with me." Jute calmly reminded. "Ya haven't earned the right ta mount a Dready, _specially_ my boy Charlee here. You lot should consider yourselves lucky that I even bothered ta pluck ya out of all that carnage."

"Think of the brain-power you would have watched go aflame." Tinker sulked, looking around. "…Good heavens, this really is it, isn't it? _Tall Plains?_ It's hotter than I last recall."

"Get used to it, _southerner,_ and from now on, you'll be callin _me_ Chieftain, none of this _chap_ shite. I'm normally a pretteh forgivin kinda bloke, but I'll break yer jaw if you disrespect me on me own turf." Jute stuck a finger in Tinker's chest. "And yu, Grublin-kin, your _'Mistress'_ is probably dead. Cynder had a good run, but not good enough for that _hoo-man _and Purple Drag team. If I hear another peep abou what you think you deserve, I'll chuck ya over the plateau. Yu both got it?"

"C-Completely." Tinker swallowed.

Gigaw didn't say anything as he crawled out from the Dreadwing's underside. He was running his claws through the grass in fascination, and drinking in the tropical rises of trees and thickets visually.

Tinker awkwardly pointed at the Grublin.

"Why him too?"

"He was clinging onta you like a wet rag." Jute rolled his tusks. "Unless you wanted to take a pitstop in the burnin toweh and brush him off, we didn't ave time. _Right_ though, little Grublin-kin, I don't have use fer people who're use-_less._ You were Cynder's little book keeper or something? Or her foot-rubber?"

"_No! _Never! Gigaw know this: Mistress _never_ let Grublin, or Ape, or _anybody_ touch her regal body. _Nononono…_" Gigaw scrabbled, drooling green spittle on himself. Jute snorted. Gigaw talked a mile a _second._ He sounded manic. "Gigaw know Dark Arts and lore! Taught by Dark One herself! _Yesyesyes…_"

"Mmmm, there's yer ticket to livin." Jute sighed. He'd honestly been looking forward to tossing the booger with legs into the surf far below.

Gulls cried in the afternoon, orbiting as white fingers dabbling the gray sky. Jute looked at them and noticed Charlee had stopped growling, and his mount's evil eyes were focused on the birds.

"…_Tch,_ alrite, go do what yu gotta do, ya earned it." Jute slapped the Dreadwing's flank, Charlee screeching and spreading his massive wings.

Tinker screamed and threw himself to the ground as the Dreadwing soared over him and up into the sky. Charlee banked and clamped his massive jaws, trapping a gull and snapping all its bones like they were toothpicks. Soon the Dreadwing's roars and the panicked caws of the gulls became distant.

"Is it over?" Tinker asked from the grass, cooing as he found his monocle and slipped it back on. Gigaw shivered and made a sneezing wheeze.

"Gigaw understand plight Gigaw is in." The Grublin blinked with one eye at a time. "…Gigaw _submits_ his service to Chieftain Jute…"

"Beggars can't be choosas." Jute huffed, his arms swinging as he stomped between them and moved for a footpath leading into the jungle. "Stay close to me. Me lads haven't squashed all the dangerous shite yet, and there's quite a few beasties still lurkin about."

"O-Oh dear." Tinker quivered as he hobbled after him, his eyes locked in terror on every thicket and palm thrush. "Isn't it possible to get your mount back and fly over this n-natural barricade?"

"_Barricade?_ These ain't them geyser fields in the north. You Visigothians are so reliant on wagons and the wheel, ya can't even rememba yur own roots." Jute chuckled, tearing a battle axe from his backstraps, its handle made of polished, thick bone. "This is how our _ancestas_ got by. No armor, no tools, maybe even a little less _wit,_ out in da wilds surviven for a living. Just stick ta me like glue, and I'll get ya through nice and sweet like, eh?"

"To be honest, I haven't utilized mobile transport in months." Tinker muttered, shadowing the Chieftain closely beside Gigaw. "The whole tribe was penned up in that blasted tower, gathering up all of those _Mana Crystals,_ and processing them to keep the war effort in the west going. I wonder how the Dark One will suffice once casualties start to inevitably climb…"

"Malefora managed ta throw enuff-a-_him _into the meat-grinder before Cynder owned Forlorn. She'll manage again methinks." Jute pointed lazily at Gigaw with his axe as he walked. "….Ya smell that air? Crisp and warm indeed. I missed this place, and all those Llama folks were so generous to _donate_ their homes and farms for us Apes to get all snug in."

Truth be told, it hadn't just been the village infrastructure. Jute had been sure to keep the wheat fields the Llama villagers so reverently tended going to ensure a steady food supply for his men. The Llama's masterful understanding of aqueduct systems and mills was working quite nicely for Jute as he exploited them for his own war machine.

Sure, some of the Llamas had complained and hemmed and hawed about '_displeasing the Island Spirits'_ –but a few executions there, a beating or two here, and all of that had gone away in a jiffy. The Llamas made good slaves. They were quiet people by nature, and couldn't fight worth a damn for beans.

Besides, in addition, when they ran out of Armordillos and the population of quails living on the islands for meat, they could always start eating the villagers themselves.

Jute loved it when things came out so effectively. Nothing was being wasted here.

"Chieftain, what is that?" Tinker pointed off the side of the footpath.

A massive Llama's head leered back at them!

…Well, one made of _stone._

The idol was cracked and overgrown with vines. Two once proud and tall ears protruding from its top had snapped off and were lying as detritus around its pedestal. The remains of a temple built into the cliff face sprawled just behind it, crude windows yawning black, and mounds of bricks broken with ancient trees splitting the foundation.

"Llama ziggurat junk." Jute waved at it with disinterest and kept moving. "Most of the islands are covered in the bloody things. Their pretty quiet fer the most part, cept when they're not, and they got these ancient Stone Golems runnin amok inside and out. We avoid those ones. Least the ones we got mapped."

"And you must have mapped most of these sites during your stay here?" Tinker asked.

"A few of em." Jute shrugged. Tinker felt his blood turn cold. Then, a pair of parrots squawked and flew overhead. The poor engineer danced in the middle of the path, whining and swatting at nothing.

"_I hate it here!_" He cried.

"Everything _green,_ green like Gigaw…" The Grublin was either uncaring or oblivious to the danger surrounding them. Jute's disgust with the creature diminished just a _smidge._ Any Ape could appreciate fearlessness, whether through stupidity or not.

Distant howls echoed through the jungle. In a crack of the thick canopy, the air rushed, and the heavy silhouette of a trio of Dreadwings swooped over the trees, their calls shrill and bleak.

"It isn't no staging point, but me lads have a bettah start then you lot." Jute allowed a bit of emotion to creep into his voice, gesturing to Tinker. "News is gotta spread fast after a whoopin like dat. For all we know, Cynder's dead, one of the Great Ape Chiefs is dead, and Visigoth's tribe has officialleh been put on the endangered list. Monkano's gonna be in an uproar."

"…Indeed." Uttered Tinker, his mood calming. "And I lost all of my field notes, my potions, my alchemy laboratory and my mixing tools."

"Valuable pile tha's soundin like. You were close with the _Mistress?_" Jute said the title scoffingly.

"No." Tinker admitted. "In fact, I believe she did not even realize I existed. I was purely Visigoth's second hand. He sacrificed much to keep me comfortable and active."

"And what have yu given in return fer all that?"

"Has this suddenly become a quiz?"

"If it is or isn't, it don't matter, cause you answer when spoken too, or I lop your perky head off and mount it on Charlee's helm horn!" Jute gripped the engineer's furry shoulder and shoved him to the ground, balancing his axe. "So? Tell me your worth there."

"You used to be a lot more _jolly,_ Jute the Boisterous."

"Now you are realleh testin my nerve."

"Ask yourself this: your Spika-Cannons, Chieftain, the ones I know you've fortified the region with, have you ever thought about who designed them?"

Jute paused for a minute, glancing at Gigaw, and then the surrounding jungle. Some twigs snapped and a quail fluttered overhead.

"The rotating mechanical ring? The pressure device fed via gunpowder in the rear casings of the Spikes?" Tinker carefully sat up, tapping his temple. "I carved the operation sticks for the first prototype from willow wood."

"…That's a find, if any." Jute snorted. "Maybe we'll have yu take a gander at some of the older guns lying about, see if you can get em in order. Me lads would be grateful."

"If it solidifies any further proof you seek, than capital! You have your fixer." Tinker bowed a little and scurried after the Chieftain. "What _other_ devices might you have stocked in your armories, Chieftain? I'm curious, as, perhaps, I can help you kill my lord's murderers when they do inevitably arrive."

"Really." Jute grunted. "How do you fancy that?"

"I see plenty of fallen logs in the area, copious cover provided by these fascinating ancient Llama ruins, strong vines and much stone to quarry…" Tinker tapped his chin, smiling deviously. "Forgive me if I'm proving too assumptive: but my readings on the North-kin of the great Jute have provided me much evidence to believe your men specialize in the construction of booby traps?"

"We've had a hand in some bloody effective things of less orthodoxy appeal." Jute rumbled laughter. "You think yu can do bettah, wrench-monkey?"

"I _know_ I can." Tinker bowed a little. "_My lord Chieftain._"

Gigaw started to manically laugh.

* * *

{🐉}

Once, it was called the village of Bri'Ca, the modern descendant of the ancient Llama hold of Gee'RuNu, whose central ziggurat still stood on the highest cliff overlooking the quaint village center itself.

A rocky cliff fall filtering crystal blue, clean water fed into the Gee'RuNu Canal, which cut the plateau into three fertile triangles. Bri'Ca's wheat fields were reliant on aqueduct veins bartered from the river's fringes, and a wheel had been constructed to power their only grain mill.

The village sported a population of merely fifty-two souls, a quarter of them children. The jungle ringed the village in two ways, and a spanning cliff overlooking the far ocean below took up the other two ways.

Bri'Ca was the only Llama settlement on this island, and it was a member of a larger network of over thirty-one other villages and hamlets across the high islands that had survived the ages, in the wake of the collapse of the ancient Tall Plains Civilization, whose mysterious ruins still dotted the landscape to this day.

Never in its long history had the War in the North ever touched Bri'Ca. Its fields were calm, its river quaint, and its people peaceful, and content to hide in their beautiful cliff pocket from the world.

That all changed when the Apes arrived.

Since Bri'Ca was a community of farmers and monks who prayed at the crumbling ziggurat, there was virtually no opposition standing in the Apes' way, and so they simply walked in and began to '_Improve' _the village to meet their needs.

The first thing Jute had done, was order one monk in every village taken to be hung, to serve as an example. Bri'Ca was not spared this precedent. However, the monk chosen had become noisy, and difficult to wrangle.

An Ape officer had taken it upon himself to improvise the botched execution, and hack the monk to death in the village center. The Apes laughed and howled, finding the bloodshed entertaining. The children and the females in the horrified Llama population screamed the loudest that day.

Once '_Order'_ had been established, the Apes set about damming the river, drying up the Llama-made aqueduct chutes for the first time in over two thousand, two hundred years. The wheat fields were fed by crudely assembled timber chutes diverting off the dam. The Apes then converted the dried canals into defensive trenches, wiring Spika-Turrets and lookout towers throughout the network. The ancient ziggurat didn't suit Jute's visions, and after labeling the ancestral structure '_Ugly and stupid looking' _–he had it knocked down to a shorter stature. The Apes then used a combination of stone from the wreckage and timber to construct a keep tower, the new headquarters of Jute's tribe.

The Apes were calling it: Fort Leaftopper. Jute had turned it into his own personal palace of sorts. Llama stone carvers were already at work chiseling out a large bust in his image in the village center under threat of death.

Finally, the Apes had set up pens for their Dreadwings, suffering only occasional '_accidental' _instances where one would get out of its chains and maul a helpless villager.

The warm weather, clean air and bountiful food was a high improvement over the geyser fields that Jute's tribe was native to. They were in the process of transporting the whole tribe into Tall Plains. Soon, the region would be nice and Ape-i-fied.

Jute showed Tinker the ransacked interior of what had once been a barn in the west of the little village.

"You think you can build me machines-a-war?" Jute had a series of tables, desks, raw materials and papyrus sheets brought in. "Get to work and prove it."

Tinker couldn't have been happier.

Even his workshop back at Forlorn hadn't been so well stocked.

Jute's tribe had access to quality timber, _milestones_ better than the willow-wood crap that he had been working with back with Visigoth. Stone was appropriated from ancient ruin bricks and cliff sides, and evenings were rationed with fresh mangoes, papaya and citrus fruit harvested from the jungles, in addition to bread forcibly baked by the Llamas.

By day three, Tinker had all but forgotten about Forlorn. Visigoth was a fleeting memory, as all Ape bosses were to their own men.

The moment the gettings got better elsewhere, right?

"So you can fix cannons, tie ropes and make pull-wheel fings, eh?"

"_Wheels and pulleys,_ my Chieftain." Tinker smiled, chewing an orange in his new workshop.

"Whatever it might be. I'm still not seein these _traps_ me and me lads were promised."

"I just finished working on _this_ the other night."

Tinker ripped a tarp off something in the center of the barn's hay-ridden floor. It was a carved block, extracted from one of the Llama ruins. There was a vertical slit carved into the face, to match the patterns of a predatory animal that had been chiseled into it already.

Jute looked at the setup dumbly.

"…Ain't that grand? Ya fancy yerself a stone worker." He chuckled. "Now tell meh how that block is supposed to kill something."

Tinker looped around to a little skeletal cube of pipes, a gear, and a tiny lever. After some clicks and clangs, the slit on the block hissed, and a pair of black darts the size of a finger each embedded in the barn wall before it with two _snaps_ of impact.

Jute blinked.

"Each one of those is coated in the skin secretions of local frogs I have been observing in the area." Tinker smugly leaned on the back of the block. "After some _volunteer_ quails ingested the secretions, I discovered that the toxicity killed the birds within fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. The frogs create this toxin from ingesting these."

Tinker held up a green, spiky berry between his paw fingers.

"These berries are avoided by the Llamas because they taste abominable. But when combined with the digestive bacteria in the frog's stomachs, _poof,_ it becomes a highly acidic solvent, of which a drop could kill a fully grown dragon within an hour."

Tinker tossed the berry, and Jute scrambled to get out of the way, watching it bounce on the floor as if it was an active mine.

"That's just my inauguration project." Tinker crossed the workshop, gathering a bundle of papyrus papers from one of the tables. "We can discuss further designs of effective lethality, of course… with your permission, my Chieftain."

Jute tore his eyes from the menacing little berry on the floor, and he grinned from ear to ear. The Chieftain's boisterous laugh filled the whole barn, and he crashed a paw over Tinker's back.

"I knew it was a stewpid ideer when I thought about letting Charlee drop ya into the ocean! Bygones, eh?"

* * *

{🐉}

Cynder had only cried twice in her entire life. Once, the moment- as a hatchling –before she was infected with Convexity. Again when the Fallen had used her own mind as a distraction in Forlorn.

_Twice._

That wasn't natural. Nothing about her really was.

The last few hours had thrown her into utter turmoil. It was probably for the better that she suffer a mental breakdown in the air, rather than, say, her castle. It meant that she could vent her rage on air and water, and those things were omnipresent, you couldn't destroy them.

She tried to bleed the chaos from her mind by exhausting herself. Cynder was a white missile streaming over the ocean, kicking off two colossal, silver waves on either side of her as she torpedoed through the air with her Wind Cyclone ability.

The whipping breeze, the roar of water and howl of her wing membranes screeching made it easier to drown out her constant sobs.

She didn't know what to do, or what to think.

Her tower, months of hard work, and Visigoth's entire tribe were all gone, taken from her by the very human she had become so enamored with, the _Fallen,_ who had wormed into her mind and found everything that made her miserable and had sought to change it.

How could someone heal and hurt you so much at the same time?

_Duality._

Cynder could never just be one thing or the other. There were always split personalities dueling in her mind with vicious teeth and rending talons.

Zargos had betrayed her, but only because she had betrayed _Malefora._ What would her Mistress do when she found out?

She didn't know what had happened to the Fallen and could not turn back. Had Zargos killed him?

_Had _she _killed him?_

Cynder roared and broke the cyclone with a thunderous clap. She caused ripples in the air and spread her membranes as far as they could go, breaking so violently that her joints threatened to pull from her scapulas.

_No._

No, the Fallen was a powerful creature. He would not be felled so easily. Zargos _had_ to have failed.

She hoped he had failed. She had never wanted to recruit him. It had all been her _Mistress'_ idea. Malefora's word had risked the Fallen's life, not hers…

Cynder screamed. The mutations burnt into her body were beginning to deteriorate, literally beginning the slow process of killing her minutely, one cell at time.

The more she disconnected from Malefora's mental link to her, the more her powers would become unstable. She had felt it through the link itself, the destruction of the last thing Malefora had that connected her with the south.

_The Vison Pool._

If the Fallen and Spyra had destroyed _that,_ then the Southern Marshes were truly lost to the Dark Army, and all of that defeat's responsibility would be put on _her._ She had never failed Malefora so catastrophically before, but she had also never felt so distant from her.

The runes on her body flashed a myriad of colors. They turned white one moment, then transformed into blue, regal shades of cyan, raging crimson and finally relaxed pink. Her elemental powers behaved erratically and drained her Mana faster than was normal. After but one Cyclone move, Cynder was exhausted, and felt her eyes becoming heavier.

A fresh scream kept her in the air. Retching, horrible pain began to stab her in very particular places.

When she thought of the Fallen, her head became inflamed with the sharpest of migraines, and her hips, her chest: really everywhere he'd made her feel warm at –would become cold as ice.

When she thought of Spyra, her Mana would redouble. She could cause almost a mile around her flight path to visually quiver as potent reams of Fear vomited from her in torrents, killing fish unfortunate enough to be swimming in the upper currents, and felling any passing coast birds.

Cynder would have rather dealt with pure defeat.

If Spyra had beaten her to within an inch of her life, burned her tower, killed Visigoth and wiped her army out, Cynder would be _half_ as distraught as she currently was. She was used to being hated, and assaulted by everything around her. She could deal with attempts on her life, or horrid, vulgar insults. All of that empty when your life was a spiraling hell.

It was the mutations. Malefora had designed them like a virus that only her mind's presence could keep subdued. If Cynder didn't find a way to banish her newfound feelings for the human, or- impossibly_ –break away_ from the Dark Mistress, her own body was going to destroy her.

She'd finally die.

Cynder hated herself for wanting to live. After spending so many evenings wishing for death, she couldn't understand how thinking differently because of someone else was acceptable.

She couldn't turn back, the South was gone. She couldn't go to her Mistress, Malefora might attempt to kill her.

She could only limp back home.

_Home._

Her lonely place of misery, brooding and isolation. Cynder flexed her claws as she calmed her flightpath, sagging under her own wings as she cried and let her tears fall to the ocean below.

Desires to kill, rend and bleed were becoming mixed with hungers for attention, physical contact and _peace._ All of those did _not_ go together!

_This was madness! She was losing her mind! She could not take this anymore!_

Cynder folded her wings and darted nose-first into the ocean waves like a dolphin, parting the water silently with but a tiny splash.

The cloudy sky was immediately replaced by a hollow sounded, blue void that got blacker the farther down it went. Cynder floated in this amniotic, going limp, folding her wings flat so that she would start to sink.

She watched as bubbles fled from her snout and pushed to the shimmering ceiling of the ocean's calm surface above her horns. Illuminated bands of light playing off the waves painted her black body like carpets of caterpillars in ghostly motion.

…._Peace._

How quiet the water was. Cynder exhaled, and the bubbles redoubled in number. She let her paws spread out beneath her in the cool nothingness cocooning her body. She began to sink, until the void of blue started to turn black, like her scales.

Her body art glowed silver, and then pink in the deep. She closed her eyes, trying to work up the courage to start inhaling the water so she would drown. Her mutations wouldn't save her from that. And neither would her Mistress. By this point, she'd probably be doing Malefora a favor.

"_Haven't you wondered who you might have been if you had actually been allowed to live a normal life? From egg to young adulthood?_"

The Fallen's voice echoed in her memory, bouncing off all the water.

_This is all _she had wanted to say to him. Instead, she'd hidden it under a veil of bullshit.

Of course she wondered.

Of course she hated Visigoth for what he had done.

Of course she hated that she had come from the same clutch-hoard as _Spyra._

Her parents. Her givers of life. Did they even exist? Where had she really come from? Why had Malefora not just let Visigoth's men smash her to death like all the other yolks, and the babies?

Cynder could see it as her vision started to turn black.

The bodies.

Smashed shells lying everywhere, and small bundles upon the floor stranded among them like islands of welp-flesh. Half-developed hatchlings, their tiny bodies dashed to the ground, crushed by Ape feet or bludgeoned by their fists. Cynder realized that she could remember the infants crying as they were butchered.

_And out of all of those lives, _mine_ was the one chosen to live…_

Cynder's eyes opened.

She could see absolutely _nothing _now_. _She'd sunken too deep.

She wanted to start wailing in grief, but she couldn't.

Instead, she inhaled.

Her gag-reflex immediately threw her perception into chaos. Cynder's lithe body twisted, like a snake being tortured by hot coals in the water. There were more bubbles, clouds of them. Her chest felt bloated and her throat caught fire.

Her mutations tried to save her by building elemental magic in her breast. She fought against it.

_…I never want to fly over the land, screaming through my wings ever again._

Cynder had always been grimly precise, and surgically efficient with her participation in the war. She'd command legions of Apes or Grublins from above, swooping down only to terrify the enemy or deal with their most troublesome champions. So much blood was on her paws. She could fill this ocean. She could drown herself in _that,_ and it would be more fitting.

She wanted peace, and it was coming to her soon.

**_Stab_**

-Cynder was just transforming into a corpse. She barely felt it when something sharp penetrated the flesh of her arm.

There was a hurried whoosh, flurries of bubbles. The dark was receding. Cynder's eyes opened, seeing the dappling ceiling of the ocean shooting towards her face.

**_Splash~!_**

Cynder's attempt to cry out in pain was muffled as she vomited a torrent of foul seawater. She thrashed in the surf, bobbing with the roughened waves. She sputtered and wrenched her eyes shut, spreading her wings in the water like lilly pads, and snatching at the thing latched into her bicep.

She gripped something metal and held it there, before discovering its alignment and quickly slipping it out the way it had come. Cynder shrieked. Her lungs were on fire. She gasped rapidly, soaked to the bone and deprived of oxygen.

…_I once read somewhere that a great writer should be awakened to their life's best work after attempting to end it._

Cynder snarled and bowed her neck, punching the water and creating a misting funnel with her unnatural strength.

Damn it to hell.

_Now_ she needed to kill something.

Cynder glanced down at the metal object in her palm and examined it.

It was a tri-round hook, tethered to a heavy line that draped through the rocking waves like a giant hair plucked from the wrist of a titan and left to drift.

Cynder followed it up the side of a rocking boat, to the rod the line was reamed from, held in the quivering paws of a _Mole._

For a moment, neither the dragoness or the fishermen did anything but stare at one another.

He was a tiny thing. _All_ of his people were. He had gray-brown fur, a pair of fat spectacles perched on a stubby nose with whiskers on only one side, and he wore an overcoat, rubberized for the water's wrath, colored dull tan.

His ship was a small yacht, a little hut making up the deckhouse and a pair of quaint sails making her drive. Cynder took all that in for a second, steadied her breathing and regained her usual composure.

**_Clack-!rckckc…_**

The Mole dropped his fishing pole behind the deck guard, frozen like a statue.

Cynder snorted and looked off in the direction of the south. She must have drifted. But even drifting, what was a Mole, a _civilian_ no less doing this far out in Frontier?

The Mole's jaw was flapping, and judging by the little drags of air escaping his buck teeth, she could determine he was trying to say something. The dragoness huffed, mimicking a crocodile as she swayed through the waves and gripped the side of his yacht, praying it could handle her weight.

The whole ship creaked and groaned, the Mole stumbled onto his backside in the center of the deck, watching with a grim fascination as the beautiful, glistening wet reptile slipped otherwise without hitch over the guard and curled on the boarding. The ship was barely wide enough for them both to have room, but Cynder didn't make any sort of care obvious at the moment.

Coughing, she relaxed against the guard and let herself drip a pool on the boards. She fanned her wings and sent drops everywhere, making the Mole flinch as a few caught his whiskers.

Cynder looked down at the little gouge on her arm and growled. The Mole lost all color but otherwise was unmoved.

"…Afternoon." She mumbled, shaking her neck and horns.

"G-Good afternoon." The Mole muttered. He sounded older than he looked. Judging by his scent, he couldn't be more than middle-aged. Cynder's predatory senses broke down the time and quality of the meat-morsel in seconds, and a primal part of her was stabbed with a tinge of hunger at the thought of eating him.

"That's quite a fishing pole." Cynder nodded at the pole discarded nearby. "Able to net the full weight of a dragoness? You don't strike me as a _dragon hunter._"

"N-No." The Mole pointed at the deckhouse quaintly. Inside were barrels and a table, the remains of a reef shark were laid across the top. "S-Shark fisherman."

"What's a shark fisherman doing this far out in the Frontier? Don't you know that this ocean is controlled by the Dark Army?"

"I know that." The Mole swallowed, still lying on the deck. "But I can't make no money without my catch."

"Your catch is worth your life?"

"It's my livelihood."

Cynder coughed and spit over the guard, reeling the rest of her thick tail from the surf to curl it around her ankle cuffs.

"You must know these waters poorly to be as far out as you are…"

"I know these waters like my own fur." The Mole blinked. "C-Can I… _stand up? _Is that… is that alright?"

"Your legs function perfectly by the looks of things." Cynder wing-shrugged as she dripped, surveying the gray horizon all around. "It's an acceptable day for fishing. The waves are calm and the sun is shy, your flocks will be just beneath the surf."

The Mole slowly righted himself, wincing as his knees cracked.

"You're in just the right zoning as well. The southern temperatures moderate the hotter northern fronts and the cooler west. I compliment your tact."

"Aye… that's… mighty kind of you." The Mole scrunched his palms together, fidgeting as he glanced at his pole. "…Did I… hurt you badly? With the hook?"

"_Tch._" Cynder dryly chuckled, glancing at the little trickle of blood leaking from her arm-hole. "I've suffered worse."

"…May I…?" He pointed at the pole.

Cynder grunted and slithered to face the other way on the deck, thumping the boards as she plopped back down and stared out over the guard. The Mole coughed and scooped up his rod before dropping the line back into the water.

He kept stealing little glances at her as the silence- undone only by the calm lap of the ocean against the bow –continued to drag on.

The Mole started when Cynder met his gaze briefly, eyed him from head to toe, and put her eyes back to the horizon.

She snorted again and shifted her forepaws.

"It must be very lonely out here." She said.

"It can be. But it does a man good to be in his own thoughts for a few days." The Mole fidgeted with the rod.

"Really? Why might that be?" Her piercing, white gaze bore into him. He couldn't tell if the beast looked hungry, angry, or maybe just curious. He'd never been good at reading dragons.

"It's time given to reflect." He swallowed, shivering under his coat. "You're removed from life: for a little while, anyway. Silence is a good start to knowing you don't got it as bad as others do."

Cynder froze for a moment, coughed again, and found that wonderfully full horizon, her tail twitching.

"That's assumptive. What if others don't think of it the same way?"

"Aye, that's their choice. We all got our own ships." The Mole smiled briefly. "-S-So to speak."

"Well I think silence is _horrid._ Silence is a corruptive bed. It doesn't remind you of the good things, it reminds you of how alone you are, and how no one cares enough to even break it for you." Cynder huffed, her chest aching. "People like to break so many things. Silence has proven impregnable."

The Mole swallowed and wiggled his pole.

"What else have you assumed to know, shark fisherman? Do you have a comforting word on gratitude and love as well?" Cynder asked sourly.

"I thought you'd be scarier."

She looked at him.

"…_Oh?_ Is that so? Tell me, am I _not_ awe-inspiring? Do I not live up to the expectations you have been schooled on since the beginning of your pathetic little life? Quite? _What am I to you?_" She was shouting by the end of that. The Mole rattled, the rod shivering noisily in his paws.

"…_Y-You're terrifying._" He choked, keeping an eye on her.

"So what do you mean then? How can I be what your nightmares have screamed to you I'd be, if I am not meeting your standard of terror? …Speak!"

"-Y-You _are _terrifying." The Mole muttered. "I've never been more afraid in my whole life."

"Then elaborate to me what you meant."

"You're supposed to be able to kill people just by lookin' at them." The Mole paused. "You're supposed to the spawn of death itself. Your skin is supposed to be covered in red fire, and your eyes are said to rip souls from those you slay."

"…That's…" Cynder crinkled her beak. "…_ridiculous,_ hogwash, hatchling-drabble."

"I know it is." He timidly nodded at her. "You're sitting on my boat asking me if I'm afraid of you."

"….Indeed I am." Cynder broke a very long stare into his eyes by refocusing on the water. She thumbed her hook-hole and whispered a little cant under her breath, the Mole's eyes widening as the flesh began to seal back up. She opened her mouth as the waves lapped, but closed it.

"I ain't begging, if that's the next thing you'll ask me."

She glared at him.

"I'm dead either way. Least I can go doing what I do best." He jerked his rod and stared at the line's merger with the water. "Twenty-seven years on this yacht. I always thought I'd reel in one too big, and he'd nab me."

"You're certainly diminutive enough for it."

"Aye." His jaw quivered and he looked at his feet. The Mole had nothing more to say after that.

Cynder shivered and sighed. The ocean's whispering began to disturb her, making its presence known by the developing twitch daggering her brow.

"You should raise your masts and set sail for Beacon before dusk, that's when my Mistress' supply flights are most active." Cynder spread her wings with a leathery creak. "Good hunting."

The Cloud Ripper creaked the whole boat as she lifted off. Soon she was gone.

The Mole stewed in his usual silence for a long time, and then, he secured his rod, and reaffirmed his feet in his normal preparation for a catch.

He started whistling his favorite folk tune from home, softly.

* * *

{🐉}

Dead-looking fields of black rocks stuck from the rougher waters, screaming waves battering over and off them to create a white soup of liquid chaos. Lightning streaked the black clouds populating the sky, the wind howled and thunder bracketed the heavens.

Cynder kept her wings on constant checks and adjustments to deal with the wind currents as she penetrated the exterior storm. The Frontier Sea was a choppy mess below, with waves sometimes measuring several stories crashing upon the endless yards of drowned rocks.

It was said that the rocks were fingers from a many-limbed, dead god that had drowned here, clawing to get at the crystals of Concurrent and failing. The wind's howl was believed to be that god's spirit shrieking as he watched his gigantic corpse turn to coral-infested stone.

Cynder had to penetrate the black clouds looming menacingly overhead. Her hide became wet and rain daggered the air in millions of strands.

The moment the clouds receded, she flew into the eye of the storm itself, a gargantuan pocket the size of a small continent, a bubble surrounded with plushy gray walls and a dome stricken with lashing lightning veins all around.

Levitating in the heart of this swirling eye was a slowly undulating cyclone hundreds of stories tall, its tail beginning in a black whirlpool swallowing the clouds, and its head curving into a massive, shrieking funnel that capped the cloud dome.

The Blue Hurricane had pure _yellow_ lightning. Flashes of it ripped through its sides as Cynder flapped and got closer to it. The winds became more powerful and the rain ceased.

Cynder bowed her head, her body art glowing white as she uttered a magical word. She soundlessly slipped into the blue clouds, the air screaming around her, and rocking her vision from near misses of lightning.

The Blue Hurricane always tried to batter her, but it never mattered. Her wards were beyond its ancient rage.

She breached the wall of the funnel, revealing a disorganized maze of levitating, snow-covered landmasses eerily sitting in eternal suspension. They were jagged, littered with precipices and deep, fanged caves. Forests of white crystal created mazes through blasted wastelands covered in a thin blanket of snow.

There were sixteen islands. She had mapped all of them. They were different sizes, had different subterranean cave networks, and all levitated on different levels of height from each other.

The largest of the islands she had marked on Dark Army maps as The Bleak Wrath. Sprouting from its crystalline epicenter was a cluster of black growths that clawed for the top of the hurricane spout above.

Cynder's castle was a Gothic nightmare that would instill terror in the hearts of any who were unfortunate enough to behold it. Here was where the dragoness stewed between campaigns for the Dark Continent, imprisoning herself in its dark halls, plotting, mulling, and seething with hate for everything around her.

Watchtowers dotted the wastelands leading up to the massive feet of her fortress. White furred Apes manned Zapper-Cannons and Gothic fortifications made from black stone and plated metal.

These were Apes who did not belong to any of the tribes and were bred to answer directly to her. Cynder's Cold Legion. Her elite private army. They only left in the form of kill teams with her, and on her most important missions.

The great front gate to the castle was sealed by frosted iron bars. She could feel the gaze of the gate's protector, as he sensed her energy from his home inside the archway itself.

Kylskada the Ice King. The ten-foot-tall magically animated suit of living battle armor that was the guardian of her abode. He commanded the Crystalline Golem legions roaming Concurrent by the bushel, having bullied them into Cynder's service years ago.

He made for poor conversation, in contrast to his abilities as a leader and fighter. So Cynder wasn't very inclined to go through the ground entrance. She was in a bad enough mood that she chose one of the many hidden aerial vents and landing pads she kept all across the central spires of the castle.

She weaved through black towers and the yawning stilt buttresses linking them, landing on a platform and skulking into the dark arch it led into.

Immediately, the howl of the storm was lost for an atmosphere of eerie silence. Her claws clicking on the black and white tiled floors echoed around every hallway she took and chamber she passed.

Most of the castle was a maze that she had memorized down to every corner, dead-end and curve. Multi-leveled and random, so that only a dragon could pass through with any ease. Even then, Cynder was the only one who understood it completely, even keeping it secret from her most loyal Cold Legion Commanders.

Eventually, she passed into a large cathedral-like chamber at the very heart of the fortress itself. Cynder's sigh traveled the massive space entirely. A long, crimson carpet extended from the wall across the aisle to a sprawling throne whose spine was made from chiseled crystals harvested from the wastelands. They glowed like ghosts in the dim shade here. Cynder made sure to run her pawpads off on the carpet before quaintly curling into the throne's cushioned nest to relax.

The dragoness let the entire day flow from her in a rare moment of private composure. She kneaded her talons into the cushion, rumbling at the velvety feel coursing her stomach.

The boom of the silent halls echoed around her. Cynder remembered the ocean.

So she brought her neck up and _chirped._

A sharp noise that rung like a bell through the whole castle. It was so silent, that when Cynder laughed, screamed or roared her voice reached every inch of its interior.

So she had taken to a habit of _chirping._

It broke the monotony.

She waited for the shrill echo to subside.

She'd missed her home. It was a comfortable environment for her, dark, warm, more silent than a grave. Cynder had spent years of her life inside this place, brooding over how she could best employ her anger to harm her enemies and expand her power.

Now, she used the castle thinktank to fantasize about Forlorn's loss, Malefora's mutations, her hatchday that never happened at the Dragon Temple, that purple nightmare Spyra…

And the Fallen.

_Chirp._

Echoes…

Cynder kneaded her red cushion. A secondary throne would do, one beside her crystalline seat. It would take some adjustment, and undoubtedly, she'd have to modify the place to suit such a diverse creature's needs, however…

_Chirp._

…Cynder was willing to go through with that. In fact, the very idea of sharing this throneroom, and these halls with another, a _male,_ excited her and left her wanting.

Twenty-five years.

_Chirp._

…Oh, those echoes…

…Ancestors, the garbage that little fisherman had spewed at her. How offensive.

Silence? To contemplate one's gifts? Rubbish! Bullshit. There were no gifts, and life did not improve because one thought lofty thoughts.

_Chirp._

Of course, this was all the setup. Cynder needed a new plan of attack, to please Malefora and regain her favor. She needed to rally the remnants of Visigoth's tribe still serving at Daragon, combine them with Jute's tribe and assemble a skeleton legion to assault the South and retake it. She'd gather Vandal's army and hail Saxony and his brutish flotilla of longboats…

_Yes,_ there it was, the pain from the mutations was subsiding. She was relearning her values again, she-

Cynder sniffled.

That echoed too.

She couldn't keep her jaws clamped, and so she barked and punched the arm of her throne. It sounded like a series of gunshots came down the halls.

Cynder's tail lazily slipped over the throne's edge and curled on a space right beside it. Cynder now had cried _three times_ in her life, and her sobs repeated themselves back to her as she longed for there to be a second chair to match her own, to seat her king that she had never had.

* * *

{🐉}


	26. Chapter 25 - Dragons and Cities

**Dragon(s)layer**

**25**

* * *

**Dragons and Cities**

* * *

_**{Ace Combat 7 OST: Dual Wielder}**_

* * *

The Fallen loved cool winds. They reminded him of a lot of different places he'd been where things had slowed down, where nobody needed him.

The weather was fair throughout the flight, leaving him free to scan the gray horizons and the formation of dragons flying around him. They truly were graceful creatures. Their limbs were tucked against their chests and bellies, their variously colored wingspans were stretched, and their gem-like eyes were perked as they picked out clouds and waves in search of threats.

Ignitia hadn't made an effort to converse with him, even through paw gestures. The wind was a tunnel up here, and nobody could hear anyone anyway. Though the Fallen could pick out questions unspoken among the flock.

Soldiers were shooting him glances constantly, eyeing up the '_Alien' _riding on the back of their famous Guardian of Fire. If he had ever been a self-conscious man, he might've found the attention distractingly bothersome.

But Spyra was beside him and Ignitia the whole time to keep his focus fixed. She tried to get his attention by doing all kinds of tricks, flipping, rolling or diving in death-defying loops. Every time she completed one, her purple eyes would flash at him, as if seeking his approval. His smile placated her as she dipped her wingspan and displayed their full orange lengths for him, extending her hourglass form against the current.

She really was beautiful.

Pride built in his chest. Such prime derg-puss, and it was all his. Life was good.

_Ouch._

On the downside of sitting up here for this long, his body was aching up a storm. His ribs still hurt, and his nose too. Zargos had really messed up his face. He couldn't even touch the dressings without cringing from a stab of cold pain.

Ignitia rolled one of her shoulders a few times, nodding to the east when he touched her neck to let her know he was listening.

Fog bustled around a very distant maze of tall, jungle-capped cliff islands. They looked like phantoms in the white glaze, further accentuated by the overcast weather.

_Tall Plains._

They were under Ape occupation. The Fallen was already drawing up plans in his mind to get down there and mess up their days.

_Later._

He had to be patient. But the opportunity for some more kills was tempting, to be sure. He did enjoy variety with his tallies.

Soon Tall Plains was gone. Ignitia again shoulder-hailed him and nodded to something. Some of the dragons in the formation shifted positions, the ones without Moles or supplies on their backs taking up the eastern forefront.

The Fallen at first thought a flight of crows was passing them. Further inspection revealed them as a flight of distant _Dreadwings._

There were five of them, flying in tandem from the Wings, their howling screeches barely audible over the wind.

Though itching for a fight at the mere sight of dragons, the Ape riders weren't fools. They didn't engage and eventually broke off to turn back for Tall Plains. The Fallen had still kept a hand on his crossbow the whole while, and many of the soldiers had tensed around their tails, readying the various bladed weapons strapped there.

Taliopia pulled up beside Ignitia and gave him a paw-gesture, a slight run down her nose, her chest, her arms, followed by a blink and shrug.

_How are you feeling?_

The Fallen winced as his ribs screamed, but he gave her a thumbs up anyway.

The sky cleared then. Brilliant blue was everywhere within minutes, the gray overcast peeling off their flanks like discarded paper shreds. Spyra looked like a hatchling first emerging from the egg. The Fallen shielded his brow from the now blaring rays of the sun and scanned the crisp horizon of the oceans below.

He spotted land past Ignitia's umber horns. She craned her neck back and smiled at him as best she could.

From what she and Harad had told him, this was the Highrise Bay, and it made the majority of the southern coast of the Dragon Realms.

Tall cliffs footed with sharp rocks stood beautifully, each capped with rolling grasslands thinly wooded above. There were some black strips bobbing in the water across the bay. Mole steamships, churning distant fingers of white smoke that crawled into the air from stacks and puffers.

There was a city built into a whole line of the coastal cliffs. It was a pattern of ribbed archways, artificial canals and sprawling buttresses. A pair of lighthouses sprouted from a rocky archipelago sealing in the otherwise Mole-made bay of extensive piers and docking moorlands. Tens of ships sat here, serviced by gear-spoked crank cranes and even a stilted highway running from the largest pier cluster. Wagons came to and from it and vanished into a tunnel in the cliffs.

That had to be Beacon, Warfang's satellite port. Ignitia said it was the busiest harbor in the world, acting as a link with the rest of the Dragon Realms and the eastern continents.

The grasslands and hills past the cliffs extended for miles, hugging the edges of a sprawling city. The walls were immense, the castles and spires grand. It looked like gold as the sun shimmered off all the tiled domes and temple roofs.

_Warfang._

There were dragons flying like clusters of pigeons everywhere. The Fallen could pick out brass, fang-mouthed cannons lining the defense palisades. Banners bearing blue and gold dragon-iconography flowed in the wind, and two massive aqueduct arch-bridges extended to the north and south, one to a small tower hovel beside Beacon, and another vanishing into the peaks of the snow-capped mountain formations sealing the upper geography.

The Wings collectively dipped as one, forming a loose arrowhead again as the wind shrieked, and the city started to impossibly become larger.

The Fallen held onto Ignitia's spines and looked at Spyra, grinning at the stupefied look overtaking her face.

They passed over walls busy with Mole patrolmen and perched dragons. Hundreds of heads were upturned to watch the flight go as they recognized Ignitia's striking crimson body at the flank, and the strange creature she carried with her.

Word had obviously spread like wildfire. He knew it because after they passed a series of balconies, towering ornate spires and pathed roofs, they came upon a gigantic square with a spout-fountain marking its heart, and ringing side-gardens flanking its edges.

The square could easily hold an army, and with the number of people that had gathered here, it might as well have already been.

Thousands of Moles. The Fallen had heard they were numerous, but… holy shit.

Murmurings and cheers made a ruckus worse than the wind currents had been. The cobblestone street rushed up to them, and Ignitia fanned her tired wings as she touched gracefully down.

The chorus of praise increased in volume, colored streamer ribbons flying from the crowds in every direction. There was clapping, whistling. The Fallen painfully slipped off the Guardian's back and scanned the gathering.

"I hope that isn't all for just one of us." He called, leaning close to Ignitia.

"It is." Ignitia shouted back, pointing a tail. "For her."

Spyra was so overwhelmed that she couldn't stand straight. The poor purple dragoness had to sit herself down as she ate up all the sights around her. The skyscraping spires, the arched parapet walks, the masses of dragons in the air, circling the square, and the hundreds of them standing tall among the ocean of short rodent-people.

"_Wow._" –Was all she could whisper.

An Ape's scream pierced the noise as a fed-up Warfangian soldier bucked like a horse, and tossed Palmet from his saddle. The poor monkey fell face-first into the cobblestone, Meep squeaking as he clutched onto his leg for dear life.

"Stop trying to pick _fleas_ off me! I don't even have any!" The soldier dragon snapped, looming over Palmet and bearing his fangs. "Filthy beast-"

The Fallen hobbled over and placed a hand on the soldier's breastplate. The dragon blinked and stepped back, eyes narrowed at the strange creature before him.

"Take a walk, friend." The Fallen smiled between his dressings. "He's with me."

The dragon's face lit with pure rage for a moment, but he simmered down, and let his temper deflate.

"_Yes._" He said, stepping back and towards the crowd, a glare passing lastly at Palmet as he made to right himself. "Just know his kind isn't welcome."

"Yep, figured_._" The Fallen gripped Palmet's mane and hoisted him up. "Stand, butler. We can't have you looking so downtrodden in the face of so many. You'll make me look bad_._"

"_I fink I'm gonna be sick I am._" Palmet's eyes darted around the crowds. Meep was shivering, bundled in the crook of his arms. "_All dese peepol are given me vertigo, Master! I can't breathe! I CAN'T BREATH-"_

The Fallen slapped him.

"Get it together, man_._"

"_-Aye, aye… alrite… I… I fink I'm on a recoverin road rightly… yeh…_"

Soldiers from the Wings fanned out to assist Mole guards in keeping the crowd at a line. Those carrying supplies (including the liberated records of Forlorn) were directed by Ignitia for a castle taking up the western flank of the square. Harad pushed his way to the front and nodded for the Fallen, Spyra and Ignitia to stay close to him.

"_I have to go with Morinth!_" Taliopia called to Spyra, even though they were standing right in front of each other. "_She'll be in the medical wing! I'll come and find you when we get a chamber._"

"_What is that place?_" Spyra shouted.

"_Castle Wyrm, headquarters of the army._" Taliopia shyly smiled. "_I-It's cool looking, isn't it?_"

"_What did you say?_"

"_We gotta' go._" The Fallen limped over and gently took Spyra's wing, nodding at Tali'. "_We'll be back for both of you. Be careful._"

Taliopia bowed before scampering off, following a pair of medics carrying Morinth on her saddle. The poor black dragoness tiredly extended a wing for them, but otherwise could do little else.

"_I feel bad for her._" Spyra called as they walked, sneering when they passed a pair of certain drakes. "_Not for them though._"

Corrinthol sneered right back as he and Torrdonal fell into line behind Harad. Torrdonal- for a change –actually looked pretty relieved to be back home. He even smiled at the Fallen.

"_What do you think of it?_" He asked, looking between him and Spyra.

"_Beautiful._" The Fallen quipped. "_Where are we going? My legs are going to snap if I keep up like this._"

Spyra blinked at the mention of his injuries and kept her tail coiled around his wrist. But she was too absorbed in grinning at the crowd and preening her wings for them. Thousands of people. All with their eyes on her. She suddenly became aware that she _loved_ being an attention hog.

That wasn't to say people weren't looking at the Fallen too. But they didn't cheer for him. Instead, he was given curious stares, dropped jaws, and lots of folded arms. The dragons reacted poorer than the Moles. Many of them actually resembled Harad from when they had first encountered each other at the temple.

Stern, disapproving, _untrusting._

The Fallen was used to it by this point. Worlds tended to not trust things not native to them. After all he'd seen, he couldn't necessarily blame them.

"_People are wary of newcomers._" Ignitia leaned over his shoulder. "_Once they witness what you can do, all of that will go away._"

"_There sure are a lot of folks here._" The Fallen said. "_Morinth told me you were running out of soldiers._"

"_We are._" Ignitia gestured with a wingtip. "_The city is normally crowded with four times this number. We're standing in Immortal Square, it's the center heart of Warfang and where the army rallies for battle. The market districts break off from here, and see that street right there? That leads to the front gates. Before the war, the square was so packed that during the afternoon, dragons couldn't cross it by ground._"

"_What about the other Guardians? Will they be able to train Spyra?_"

"_I'm not sure._"

"_Why?_"

"_Because I don't know where they are._" Ignitia huffed. "_We're going to the Council Building, see it there?_"

"_You mean the one with the rows of solid gold dragon statues lining a flight of steps that'll probably kill me? I didn't even notice._" The Fallen groaned. "_I feel like a damned cripple._"

"_You served us greatly back there._" Ignitia surprised him by slipping a powerful, soft wing under his legs and hoisting him like he weighed nothing. "_And you saved all of our lives. I'm honored to assist you._"

That's a mighty high change from this morning, he wanted to point out. The Fallen didn't bite the hand though, and gratefully nodded, holding onto her membranes as Harad and her wing-jumped up the massive flight of stairs.

The rest of the Wing and Spyra were soon after, and all of them passed under a massive arch frame centered with a pair of golden-bronze doors painstakingly carved with dragons in murals across their faces. These glinted in the sun and creaked as some unseen force parted them. The roar of the crowd began to simmer and the golden city became lost as they passed into a spanning lobby, which was contrastingly quiet.

A troupe of Mole warriors in black and gold armor formed a thin line at the foot of the steps.

**_Bonnggggg…._**

-The doors shutting echoed loudly. Now they could hear nothing but a little interior boom.

"_Aw man,_ I wanna' go back outside." Spyra whined, staring at the doors. "That was some hell of a party! Is it always like that?"

"All will be explained as soon as we see the Council." Ignitia smiled warmly, setting the Fallen on his feet. "This was not my idea of a formal introduction to the capital, mind you me, but the Council was insistent they see for themselves the next Purple Dragon and the Fallen."

"Oi, this place is darker than da inside of an Anteata's beak hole." Palmet looked around, lightly drumming his fingers on Meep as he cradled the little sewer octopus. "Want meh ta carry yer dynamite bandos there, Master?"

"Not in this millennium." The Fallen blinked. "At least not in here. Though, if these people turn out to be assholes, I might reconsider."

Ignitia looked horrified.

"_Oh jeez, I'm kidding._" The Fallen spread his arms, and grunted when it hurt.

"I've never been inside the Council Building before." Torrdonal gulped, looking around. "There's no water in here, right?"

"There isn't much more to see, it's just daily examples of social elitism, boring law-talks and rule-sticklers." Corrinthol grumbled. "How long do I have to be here? I'm tired after all that little misadventuring."

"Amazing, the pack mule believes his thoughts matter." The Fallen creased a lip.

"I am _not_ your pack mule, you fleshy twig-man!" Corrinthol snarled, soot trailing through his teeth as he approached the human threateningly, his wings opening.

Spyra growled like a wolf and placed herself, hunched, between him and the Fallen, her hindquarters raised in preparation for a predatory leap.

"I'm ready ta' go as soon as you are." She snarled, wiggling her hips like a cat readying to pounce.

Corrinthol lost his spirit instantly, and he clenched his jaws shut and stepped back, still angrily darting his attention between her and him.

While true, he was chomping at the bit to get a good rematch with the alien since their wrestling-match back at the temple, he was unwilling to attach that same foolhardy thirst for vengeance with the possibility of facing _Spyra._

He'd seen her move, whipping all over Apes like they were standing still, ripping their faces to ribbons, gutting them, burning them alive, electrocuting them until they were nothing but blackened crisps…

Corrinthol gnashed his teeth at her pitifully in some vain attempt to maintain his draconic pride as he backed away.

"Wait until I tell my father about what the two of you did to me. You'll regret it." He sneered.

"Ah, I'm interested to see his reaction, if he's even _half_ the bitch you are, then I can only imagine the barrage of girlish slaps and autistic rambling that is sure to come our way." The Fallen itched at his bandages.

"_Enough._" Ignitia snapped. "All three of you: temper yourselves and back off."

"I ain't the one temperin'." Spyra exposed her fangs as Corrinthol retreated. "You okay, Fallen?"

"As long as I have my bodaciously plump plum dragoness with me, I should be more than okay." He listed off quickly. In a flash, her attack-mode dropped like a brick, and Spyra sprung up like a gazelle, her side against his legs as she turned pink and giggled at him. "..And just as a note: you people don't skirt on formalities." The Fallen glanced around at the pillars lining the little lobby chamber, and the torches faintly lighting it amber. He paused, thoughts bouncing around inside his bandaged head. "How much do they know?"

"They know that a mystical being fell from the heavens, wiped out an army and defeated the Terror of the Skies in personal combat, to be blunt." Harad approached them. "The Councilors' expectations are high, for both of you. Don't embarrass us all with your usual _tricks._"

"_Pffft, _mystical." Spyra snickered, hip-bumping the human. "They must think you're a unicorn or some shit."

"Wait until they see the mule waltz in through the doors." He rolled his eyes. "Captain."

"Fallen." Harad looked torn for a moment, before he huffed, and the muscled earth dragon bowed to his forepaws before the Fallen.

Spyra's jaw dropped.

"Am I dreaming? Are we sure this is the same guy?" She whispered to Ignitia.

"For all our prior _disagreements,_" Harad growled, holding the pose for not a second longer. "I cannot ignore that your actions secured the survival of my Wing. You have my gratitude."

"Don't sweat it, Hacksaw." The Fallen chuckled, his hands on his hips. "You fought well yourself. They should put a plaque up for you in that square: _Captain Hashbrown, leader of the Wing that found the Purple Dragoness and her badass friend._"

Harad sighed.

"The Councilors are waiting for you."

"Just be to the point, and all will be well." Ignitia fluffed her wings and cast her head back, making the Fallen laugh as she swept all her facial fins like a human woman would cast her hair. "Goodness, though their timing couldn't have been worse. Fresh from the field of battle and the strains of a flight. I probably look more disheveled than an _Ape._"

"_Oi,_ I take slite offense to dat I do." Palmet stroked Meep. "An I say _slite_ because while it is racially and insultin-wise… ya realleh ain't wrong. We look like walkin shite on the best'a days!"

"Best of days must be infrequent for your kind." Ignitia eyed the Ape toe to snout with distaste, then looked at a pair of doors at the end of the chamber. "Where are the sentries, Captain?"

"They want _him,_" Harad nodded at the Fallen. "in there as soon as possible without incident. Many of the Councilors suggested the absence of warriors, against my opinion as an officer. But, where we came to an agreement: he must enter _unarmed._"

"I call B.S, we _like_ our toys, thanks very much." Spyra frowned.

"It's fine. I'll do it as a gesture of good faith." The Fallen started to painfully slip all the gear hanging off his body onto the floor of the chamber. Several bandoliers of dynamite, two Ape swords, an axe, crossbow, pouch of bolts and rations, expended injectors, _expended gun…_

By the time he was done, a small pile was sitting on the floor. Harad blinked at it and finally angled his head.

"What about my butler?" The Fallen jabbed a thumb at Palmet.

"No _Ape_ may pass beyond these doors." Harad frowned. "He stays here with the rest of your _property._"

"Ooo, how exotic that one, I ain't evva been referred tu as _properteh_ befer." Palmet hummed, actually mulling the sentence over to decide if he found it belittling. He held Meep up and asked: "What do you fancy, Meep? Property is good, yeah?"

"**_Meep._**" The octopus rocketed out of Palmet's arms and buried itself in his back fur, giving off a little sneeze once it was settled that cast little Ape-hairs everywhere.

"Awrite, Meep, momma-Palm's got ya he does." Palmet squatted on the floor with a tiny _ptt! _–and grinned stupidly at the Fallen. "I'll polish yer gear while you're away, Master! It'll look nice an spiffy by the time ya come back from yer meetin proper."

"If I find out you spit-shined it, I'll peel off your eyelids." The Fallen pointed nonchalantly. "But otherwise: what a lovely suggestion! Get to it, butler. Now then Captain Hamazzle, after you…"

"Come with me." Harad rolled his eyes.

Harad led them through a smaller pair of bronze doors. They walked into a great domed dais chamber, where every movement was echoed and all the fringes were dark. A small incision skylight in the roof's heart showed a glimmering band of light from the sun that focused on a stone podium at the top of a staired roundel plat. Above, suspended behind a short wall, were rows of seating arrangements, stone futons for the councilmen to lounge over.

Most of them were filled with the eerie black visages of dragons, and all of their eyes were focused on the Fallen and Spyra, their faces hidden by the contrast of light surrounding the dome's center.

"…_They're all staring._" Spyra whispered, the dreadful silence truly getting to her. "_Do I have something on my horns?_"

"_I think it's just what they do._" The Fallen muttered, limping as he followed Harad. "_Try to keep the vulgarity down, just for face's sake._"

"_No promises…_" Spyra narrowed her eyes as she scanned the multicolored councilor dragons. "…_I'm gettin' privileged-asshole-old-guy vibes from a bunch of 'em. Where's the tapioca at?_"

"_S-Ssshh._" He snickered, fighting to not laugh.

"The Guardian of Fire returns to us unharmed." One of the councilors stood from his stone futon, revealing himself to be a red-scaled drake with half a horn missing and kind eyes. His scales were edged with yellow all down his body, making it appear as if his muscular torso was literally shimmering like liquid bronze as he moved. Athletics must have been a strong suit for him, for the development of his physique was almost chiseled, like it was carved from stone. "How are you, Ignitia?" He asked.

"Starbrun," Ignitia bowed her neck a tad. "I've been worse."

"You didn't meet any harm, I hope?"

"None unprevented."

"Is the session started now _officially?_" Another councilor, a blue one with a cyan underbelly, drummed his talons on his chin.

"Indeed." A white scaled dragon with a very nasally voice nodded. The Fallen felt his skin crawl at the sound of his voice. He just… had the voice of a douchebag, he didn't know how to explain it. "We can start promptly."

"With some measure of speed I hope, Condor." Another quipped. "Look at the state this… _alien_ is in. You there, creature, are you not wounded?"

"Fuck yeah I'm wounded you old-"

_Crunch!_

Ignitia stepped on the Fallen's foot, making him grunt. The councilors all sat silent, waiting for an answer.

"_Control yourself, and go to the podium._" She mouthed at him.

"_Are they all such dicks?_" He growled over his shoulder.

"_They're older than me by several centuries, what do you think?_"

The Fallen grit his teeth and limped up the brief stairway, standing behind the podium for support. His bandages were really chafing and right about now, he didn't have the patience for an interrogation. God damned natives and their local governments…

"_Yes,_ I'm wounded, but I was healed to the best of your Wing's ability." The Fallen spoke clearly. "I humbly thank you all for allowing us to present our case before you."

"You speak our tongue." Someone said.

"Common's common." The Fallen shrugged, eyes scanning the futon rows. "This is the entire Dragon Council of Warfang?"

"Yes. You were briefed on our attentions?"

"More or less."

"So, then questions may begin." Starbrun eyed the Fallen with interest. "I only have field reports from Captain Harad to base off of. Ignitia, is it true that you and this… _being_ before us battled side by side?"

"He is one of the most skilled warriors I have ever seen." Ignitia nodded. The Fallen took a second to look back at her and flash a grin. He felt his chest leap when she responded with a sort of… _sultry_ expression, a warm smile and a flutter of her amber eyelids.

_Is her back arching?_

The Fallen coughed, trying to rid his nose of the encroaching, flowery scent pinpricking at the edges of his attention.

"Where did you come from?" The question echoed out from the futons. He hadn't seen who had asked it, and so he settled for sweeping his eyes about the railing. The Fallen drummed his fingers on the podium, and glanced back at Harad and Ignitia, and then Spyra.

"…It's complica-"

"_From the sky._" Spyra piped up, her voice shrilly echoing around the dome.

"The Purple Dragon…" One councilwoman breathed. "Step closer into the light beside the alien."

"What, are we showing them off now like a pair of exhibited wildlife samples?"

"Silence please, I desire to get a closer look at both of them myself."

"Peace." Starbrun voiced calmly. "All will have their concerns addressed. Purple Dragon? Would you tell us your name?"

"What? Rocky back there didn't share?" Spyra raised a brow, hip-bumping the Fallen over and standing on her hinds with him on the podium's armrests.

Harad's minute growl whispered behind them, and Spyra snickered.

"We wish to hear it from you." Starbrun blinked politely, though obviously taken aback by her rudeness.

"Spyra." She grinned. "I'm purple, dangerous, and ready to solve your Dark Mistress problem with a lit-tal _fie-yah,_ baby. Y'know what I'm sayin'?"

Some of the councilors chuckled, a handful growled, most of them just kept the constant displeased mugs they most likely wore every day.

Councilor Condor rose from his seat and walked down the row, until he was looking over the railing and into the ring below.

"What is that, exactly?" Condor asked, pointing a gray wingtip.

"What's what?" Spyra blinked.

"_That,_ that attitude."

"I ain't got attitude."

"Mm. I want to remind the seats that we did not steal our schedules and our hearts for mere whims. We all might suffer petty, bemiring words of others, however..." Condor smiled slowly, eyes scanning the whole room. "I must ask you to stay on point."

"_Did he just say I talk too much?_" Spyra hoarsely hissed at Ignitia. "_That son of a bitch! I'll kick his catheter in!_"

"_Sssh._" The Fallen elbowed her.

"Does the _female_ have something to add?" Condor was still smiling, his gray and white face revealed starkly on the edges of the skylight glare.

The Fallen ground his teeth. Now, he didn't just want to punch Condor, he wanted to shoot him. "You'll have to excuse any insults incurred there, my friend, those of higher station tend to cringe at the embarrassing attempts of guile from those with rotten tongues_._"

Condor snorted.

"What is your name, alien?" Starbrun settled back on his futon.

"I'm known as the Fallen, for I am nameless." The Fallen tore his eyes from Condor and nodded respectfully at the fire drake. "That's all the information I'm able to give on my own identity."

"Did you actually come from the sky?" Someone asked.

"Yes. I fell in a containment unit, and impacted in the Southern Marshes over two weeks ago. I'm not… _from here._" The Fallen sheepishly leaned on the podium top, minding Condor's scaly brow arching as his silver eyes scanned him top to bottom. "But I've come to the conclusion that the only way I can return to where I came from is by ceasing the hostilities consuming your world. Thus, even though I was originally forced to stay as a necessity, I was touched by the effort of your cause and have decided to side with you against the Dark Armies."

"Our _world?_"

"Your world, quite, which is one of many." He said.

Some hushed whispers trawled out among the rows.

"He's on our side." Spyra announced, her tail running over his legs under the podium. "I've seen him firstclaw! He wiped out an entire Ape army, _and_ broke Cynder's tower."

"The Forlorn Watch?" Another councilor asked. "You are the one who orchestrated its destruction?"

"It was necessary to destroy Cynder's army in a single move." The Fallen nodded. "I understand that the tower was considered a relic, and it wasn't an option I took lightly, but we couldn't let the opportunity pass."

"Indeed, and with such effective engagement too." Condor sneered. "But what of the Terror of the Skies? What of the Black Wraith?"

"She escaped." The Fallen said. More muttering. "She's fled back to Concurrent Skies. She's currently suffering a fall-out with Malefora-"

"Don't say that name in these chambers." Condor smiled. "_Con-tinue~."_

"…she's held up in her castle." The Fallen glared darkly, becoming angrier when Condor didn't even blink. "Ignitia was also responsible for destroying her Vision Pool underneath the tower. It was transforming the landscape, and now that corruption is leaving the swamps. They can become fertile again."

"Maybe a hundred years ago, that would have been fantastic news." Starbrun sighed. "The Dragon Realms are in no position to consider _reclamation _of any kind. The South's loss to us has been… _gruesome,_ bordering unendurable."

Ignitia sighed behind them and pawed at the first step on the dais.

"The whole Wing can vogue for the Fallen and Spyra." She announced. "Every single one of us, including the Captain, can attest to the human's skill in battle and his expertise which was integral in our victory over Cynder's forces."

"Um… y-yeah, _yes._ He was… amazing." Torrdonal stammered when the councilors looked in his direction. "And, well… he and Spyra work well together. I think."

"Ah," One of the councilors nodded. "so the two have become quite close from fighting beside one another?"

The Fallen coughed again, and Spyra purred as she bumped sides with him.

"_Hee-hee… mmmyeaahhh~, we're close…_" She snarkily rumbled, making the Fallen flush.

"He's very powerful." Harad grumbled.

"Aw, Hansel," The Fallen laughed. "I just might give you a hug when these bandages come off."

"It's _Harad._" The Captain grumbled defeatedly. "And stay away from me."

When all gazes fell on Corrinthol, the flame drake lowered his neck, his eyes darting around uncomfortably. For a minute, he locked eyes with the human, and his expressionless chops gradually evolved into a terrible sneer.

"No comment." He mumbled, hatefully staring the Fallen down. Ignitia shook her head at him. Some of the councilors started muttering to each other.

"What about my daughter?"

Another councilman stepped forth, a quaint, very thin white dragon with rose-colored eyes and wings. He had black horns, meek teeth, and a feathery gait, his judgments locked behind a studious gaze. His wings were huge, almost as big as Cynder's had been. They reflected light off their pink membranes beautifully, like flower petals shown through with sunlight.

"What has happened to Taliopia?" The dragon asked, his sharp voice echoing around the council chambers.

_Thought he looked familiar…_ The Fallen cocked his head.

"Personal matters have no place in this." Condor said on the other side of the row ring, singsong, still giving that awful smile. _Damn it,_ the Fallen wanted to punch him in the mouth. "I think what's more pressing is the rejection from a member of Captain Harad's Wing…"

"Our guests are fresh from the flight, coming from a journey that spelled much peril for all participating in the campaign due-South, I'll allow it." Starbrun said, his gaze sweeping over Condor disapprovingly. Anybody could feel the fiery beams shooting across the whole friggin' room. He and Condor probably hated each other passionately. "Councilman Leetol, you may ask your question."

"Well?" Leetol eyed the Fallen and Spyra, his expression breaking for a moment along with his voice. "How is my daughter? Was she hurt?"

"Your daughter was unharmed, and she is the one who fixed me." The Fallen rubbed tenderly at the dressings over his hands. "In fact, I'm going to see her about finishing these injuries off with some healing mixtures of hers after this convene. You should be proud, good sir, she has immense talent."

Leetol looked like a statue, an unsteady breath shivering out through his teeth. He didn't say anything further, and stepped back to his futon quietly, his huge wings crinkling as they folded behind his wiry neck.

"…_That was… weird._" Spyra whispered. "…_He's just gonna' take everyone's word for it? Taliopia was talkin' up a storm back home, all about him and her mom. I can't tell if he just doesn't know _how_ to care, or if he cares at all!_"

"_I'm going to make things easier on myself and believe it isn't that bad._" The Fallen leaned closer. "_But, no offense: you dragons seem to have a lot of parental issues._"

"_There was nothing wrong with my parents._"

"_Your parents were _bugs."

"When you said _cease the conflict_ in our world, what did you mean by that?" A councilwoman regained their attention.

"He meant stopping the war." Spyra chimed out loud, tearing from the little hush-hush she had been harboring with him over the podium. "What, did he speak a different language? Me and him are here ta' _win._ And we're gonna'! We just need a pointer or two in the right direction."

Spyra's tail was wagging up a storm as she hip-bumped the Fallen and looked back at Ignitia.

"So where do we start, baby?" She grinned.

Starbrun looked surprised up in his futon. He drummed his claws and opened his chops to speak-

"Blasphemy." Condor's laughter was as shrill as his tone, and its presence among the council ring was unpleasantly jarring. The Fallen imagined a make-belief firearm suddenly appearing by the dragon's black-horned head and blowing his brains all over the guard rail. "We have brought before us a child and a delusional, perhaps endangered member of a race undocumented since times of yore. How are we to believe that any of these events and their circumstances have occurred? Where might there be _proof? _Chieftain Visigoth has harried our forces since the last continental invasion years ago, defeating many dragons in personal combat. The Terror of the Skies, is also well known for her unmatched martial skill, I need not remind any drake or hen here…"

"Wait, just _wait,_" The Fallen held his hands up, his arms painfully protesting. "you want _proof?_"

"That isn't much to ask for in light of the grand scheme of this little venture." Condor clucked, pressing his two burly, white-scaled forepaws on the guard rail to lean over the link imposingly. "What is a drake supposed to do when a pair of miscreants pose as the saviors of our world, and start dishonoring our holy sanctum with their decidedly imbecilic hallucinations?"

Spyra turned red as a tomato, literal steam starting to creep out of her nostrils. Her canine-esq growl reverberated around the whole chamber, and her claws dug little rents in the podium's stone. Condor looked pleased with the reaction he had caused, a smug expression swiping away any pause.

"The only hallucinations here are from those too old to be in any position of _regard or judgment._" The Fallen growled. "Is this the normal welcome to your grand city you give newcomers, Councilor Condor? Or are you naturally a bigoted sycophant who would have been better off having run down his mother's leg?"

Several of the councilors stormed to their feet, wings were spread, claws and teeth bared. Ignitia went pale as a sheet and Harad became so red that he almost looked related to Corrinthol.

"_Peace._" Starbrun spoke, glancing around the room. "We must have peace-"

Boisterous laughter suddenly erupted from one end of the futon rows. A portly dragon covered in yellow, white-dotted scales fell out of his futon and hit the ground with a walloped thud, his folded flesh jostling from both the impact and the heaves of his great chest. Starbrun didn't look amused, setting back on his seat with a rigid huff.

"Councilor Asden," The fire drake pinched the bridge of his snout. "I hardly think you're making this better."

"-_T-The alien has my vote!_" Asden cackled, several silvery necklaces hanging over his white-plated chest jingling as he rolled on the step. The dragon looked like a yellow marshmallow, cushioned by all his obese weight as to not even feel the sharp edges of each step he glanced over. "-_Aha-! Ha-! Ahemmm~, _ugh… excuse me."

Now, the council had gone from gawking at the alien to one of their own. They all watched as Asden peeled himself of the floor, jiggling with a last '_Aha!_' –of hysterics, before he leisurely slipped his great folds back atop the futon. The Fallen- even from his distance –could liken the fat councilor to a content, overfed cat sinking warmly over a perch too small for its own girth, his folds covering the caramel covered talons poking out from his flipper-like paws. Asden did compose himself but failed to erase his grin. He ran a paw down the porcupine-like white frills running down his head all the way to the tip of his fat-rolled tail, glancing at the Fallen and Condor in turn.

"What I meant to say was: I respect a rightly deserved jab where it's needed." He smiled at Condor on the other side of the ring. "You can't go poking bee nests and not expect a stinger in your eye."

Councilor Condor looked unfazed by the stabbing remark. He merely kept his silver eyes locked with those of the Fallen. There was an unspoken resonance between both of them: _enemy,_ and there really was no fixing that.

"Forgetting Asden's _outburst_, I think the Purple Dragon should be confined to the Guardian Temple to undergo penance, and this foreign creature should be locked in Warfang's dungeons." Said Condor pleasantly. "Consolidating what we can from this mess is our number one priority."

Spyra's wings flapped like loose parchment as she tried to leap over the podium at him, the Fallen caught her by the tail and yanked her back down.

"_That_ is an extreme punishment for a slight you started, Councilor." Ignitia announced. "I recall Regulations, line fifty-five, stanza two, and remind the Council about our laws regarding a dragon's personal vendettas, and how they are banned when in office."

"We are all well aware of the rules our grandfathers wrote, Ignitia." Starbrun ran a claw down his snout, trying to appear in a good mood. "Councilor Condor, your suggestion is taken into consideration and is rejected."

Condor smiled. He had not stopped staring at the Fallen with menace, however.

"I accept with understanding." He finally said. "Forgive my brashness."

"And _Fallen,_" Starbrun narrowed his reptilian eyes. "you're not in a situation to become smart with us, seeing as you're inside _our_ city, in _our _Realms, at _our_ mercy. Do you understand?"

The Fallen's face twitched, the sound of paper crinkling practically being heard as he forced his laugh-lines up into a smile.

"Crystally clear, Councilor." He blinked.

"...Very good." Starbrun tapped his talons and eyed around the room. The other councilors had all gone silent, even Asden, who still looked purely bemused by everything he had just witnessed. Leetol was staring at the floor, his jaw quirked as he mulled on something between the cracks of the stone. "Has anyone else any objections or queries for our charge?"

"Are there more of your kind coming?"

Ignitia surprised the whole room by stepping to the front of the podium and scrutinizing the Fallen with her amber gaze.

The human scratched his chin and gripped the sides of the podium, his fingers wriggling. The intermittent impalements of silence in this room were grating on his nerves.

"No, there are no more _humans_ arriving via any means, pods, ships, by foot, from the air, nothing at all." He listed off. "My arrival in this world is over, and now that I'm trapped in the same boat as the rest of your people, I would say all of us need to work together to destroy Malefora and stop the Dark Army."

Starbrun gazed around the chamber as murmuring started to boil up from the rows. The councilors looked… well, nobody could really tell how they looked. Some looked enthusiastic, some angry, some like stone statues, some even appeared jocular, like the whole discussion had been a sick pun.

"We need time for consensus, I believe." Leetol reappeared in the discussion suddenly again, craning his long neck over to regard Starbrun across the dais rows.

"Indeed." Starbrun stepped off his futon and gestured a wingtip to those in the center of the chamber. "We still offer our extended wings of hospitality, Fallen, Spyra, we have no desire to turn away obvious allies to our cause, especially one who was deemed by prophecy to change everything."

Most discussions in the room ceased, putting Starbrun in a sort of spotlight. The old dragon licked his fangs and continued.

"I was not there to see what Ignitia and her Wing were there to see. I am being told that these two are great warriors, and that they desire to change a lifestyle we have maintained for centuries. I am an old drake, I've watched time pass me on all sides and have become familiar with its twists and grandeur, and its irony.

"Do I have my doubts about such claims? Yes. Do I believe that this journey propositioning us right at this second will be hard, and arduous, and confusing and terrifying? All yes. However…" Starbrun flashed a smile at Ignitia, his wings preening behind him. "…the esteemed Guardian of Flame of Warfang has come to her own consensus, and long loyal soldiers and an officer of our Northern Army have all supported the newcomer's claims. I see no reason to deny guestship to them in our city.

"Furthermore, as the Purple Dragoness is to be trained to master her elements, I vote for Spyra to be granted full access and student status at the Warfang Academy until such a time she is deemed ready by the Guardians, and the Council, to move along in the ranks of the army itself."

"…_I-Is this a dream?_" Spyra salivated. The Fallen grinned at her and rubbed her wing membranes.

"Lastly," Starbrun paused. "the Council will discuss the matter further under sealed chambers. We would also like to attain the word of all four of the city's Guardians, and hear what they may suggest for our proceedings."

Ignitia went to speak-

"But, Councilor Starbrun, we don't know where they are." Leetol sheepishly shifted on his futon.

Starbrun rolled his mandible, his browline furrowing. He made eye contact with Ignitia and looked away when he realized both flame dragons were puffing air trying to find the right thing to say. He settled for shaking his head and snorting soot out his snout.

What else was there here? Today was so unique and strange all at the same time. Standard procedures meant little when the impossible happened.

"We grant you access to Warfang." Starbrun waved his tail. "Welcome to our capital. Now, for today I belie-"

"I request an orderly watch on the newcomers." Condor spoke. "A mere security precaution, ones appointed from _other_ leaders than myself. I do have the safety of our realm in mind, and these are trying, _unique_ circumstances…"

"Very well." Starbrun conceded. "Warfang's streets are yours. I trust Ignitia to lead you to your proper lodgings and occupational setups at the academy itself. Your escort will be assigned to you shortly to accompany your travels."

The Fallen grumbled under his bandages. All eyes were on _him_ when that last bit was said. It was the unspoken truth. Those escorts were for _him._

"Dismissed." Starbrun barked, his proud voice booming through the hall like thunder. "We convene tomorrow, _alone._"

* * *

[🐉]

"Are you out of your damned mind addressing a member of the Dragon Council like you did?"

"Are _you_ telling me that all the yelling this morning wasn't enough?" The Fallen cringed, walking stiffly down the grand flight from the council building itself. Ignitia held a wing out to assist him in stepping down the last row, sighing under her breath.

"_No,_ and I apologize for raising my voice." She said. "And I'm also not disagreeing with you. Councilor Condor is perhaps my least favorite of the representatives for Warfang. I voted against his election if you could ever believe it."

"It's a good thing I'm in such a chipper-ass mood right now, else I woulda' sprung at that douchebag and ripped his pancreas out." Spyra vented, stomping down the steps and curling her tail around the Fallen's ankles as she haunch-sat. "…_Soooo,_ now that we've been cleared by the jeriatric patrol, what happens next?"

"You train, you become the dragon our legends portray you as, you journey to the Dark Continent and put an end to all of this madness." Harad grumbled, his eyes tiredly sweeping the plaza. "…I don't like the way it sounds either, before you ask."

"But what else is there really to do?" Torrdonal sat on one of the steps. "We have a one-drake army alien, the mythical Purple Dragoness of legend, and a whole bunch of dragons and Moles who want their homes to stop catching fire." He looked meek. "…Where do you even go off from there? This is very overwhelming."

"It's not going to change from the way it's always been." Corrinthol sneered. "Two people can't just win a war, especially one like this. This all started before anybody standing here right now was even _born._"

"Corrinthol, I might have been brash to the Fallen this morning, but I don't feel I'm overstepping anything in regards to _you._" Ignitia frowned at him. "Your lack of support in front of the Council for an effort that could literally mean the difference between our world persevering or being _utterly destroyed,_ is shameful."

"_Shameful?_ What about what the alien did to me? I don't see any of you shed-skins saying anything about that!" Corrinthol burst. Harad growled by Ignitia's side, but didn't intervene. "I was beaten, _strangled_ and then used as a pack-mule! _Me! _Son of a General! _A damned pack-mule!_"

"Yeah, an frum what I herd abou it, you were real good at it too." Palmet proudly hopped down the last step and grinned apishly. "Kudos there for ya, lad, you got to carry the Master's boom-bag! He ain't evva letting me do that he ain't."

"Under certain circumstances, butler, you may just get your wish." The Fallen painfully turned around and looked at Corrinthol. The flame drake met his gaze and snarled, his claws flexing into the steps.

Spyra was there in a heartbeat, growling and putting herself before him. The Fallen shook his head and put a hand on her shoulder, keeping her back.

"You know, Corr', you're right." Said the Fallen. "And I'm sorry for it, I really am."

"You are?" Spyra dumbly blinked. Even Ignitia looked shocked.

"…Yeah, well apologies aren't good enough." Corrinthol smiled wickedly. "And if you don't want me to get my father on you, you'll have to _beg._"

"You didn't let me finish," The Fallen grunted as he knelt in front of the fire drake, eye-to-eye level. "I am sorry…"

"You said that already, and I just told you, you have to _beg-_"

"-for the fact that you are such a worthless degenerate, your own mother tried and failed to abort you due to her own clinical stupidity, which she, unfortunately, passed down to _you._"

Corrinthol's mouth flapped open, but only air came out.

Spyra rolled down the steps and landed on the street, laughing so hard that she started to wheeze. Some passersby in the plaza stopped and stared.

"Go on." The Fallen turned dark all of a sudden, prodding a finger in Corrinthol's face. "See if daddy can save you from the shitstorm. I bet you let him fix a lot of things for you, don't you?"

"-_W-Wait-! S-Stop-! C-Can't- breathe-~!_" Spyra cackled.

"Did he find you a new pair of balls when the little berries you had down there snapped and fell off?"

Spyra howled, turning crimson as she rolled on the cobblestone.

"Step back, Fallen, you've said enough." Harad grumbled, the only one in the discussion completely unaffected by the words spoken.

Corrinthol had to take a moment to snap his jaws shut, his young, needle-like face scrunched as he desperately clawed to keep down whatever was building up in his throat, be it a scream, an angry shout, or a mortified sob. Eventually, all the fire drake could say was:

"O-One day, I'm going to _kill you._"

The Fallen smiled. Then, he hooked two fingers into Corrinthol's nostrils and yanked his snout down with a painful jerk. Corrinthol squawked and scrambled like a newt.

Harad stepped in and physically pushed the Fallen back with his tail, standing between him and Corrinthol.

"I said for you to _step back._ Corrinthol is _my_ soldier." Harad frowned.

"One must protect their bitches." The Fallen dusted himself off, glancing at Spyra. "An art I've perfected, myself."

"My father's hearing about this!" Corrinthol hollered, his umber wings spreading as he took off from the steps and glided over the plaza. "_I'll get you, Fallen~!_"

"That's what they all say." The Fallen grunted, watching the drake fly off. "Going back to Spyra's question: what next?"

"I'll show you." Ignitia returned with her warm smile and gestured for the plaza. "Captain, we're going for a walk."

"Noted." Harad flexed his massive wings out and then folded them. "A Guardian is as good an escort as the Council could hope for, minus Condor and the few who agree with him. I still request I accompany you."

"-_Whoo~! …_Aw, g-gimme' a break, Hamflap." Spyra rolled her eyes as she collected herself off the ground. "It ain't like the Fallen's running around covered in blood with a cleaver in his hand like one of _them._" She tail-pointed at Palmet, who gasped and started examining his fur (and Meep) for splotches.

"At least not today." The Fallen quipped pleasantly.

"Captain, I formerly request you return to your lair and regain your strength, you as well Torrdonal. You're dismissed from duty for the rest of the day." Ignitia's tail came around and ushered the human and his purple friend forwards with her. "Come along now, let me take you to your new home for the time being."

"_Home?_ I just left my home." Spyra blinked. "…W-Wait… do you mean…?"

"She means the academy." The Fallen said. Spyra squeed and pierced the eardrums of several passing Moles.

"Well now, ain't dat jus a fine endin for the afternoon." Palmet trudged up beside Harad, petting Meep. "Back where I come from, the lads used ta organize little relaxation gatherings for the end of a day. We'd strap up dragon-dummies from ropes and whatnot an beet the piss outta em! Good fun it was."

Torrdonal went crossed eyed and started shivering.

"The only reason I haven't crushed you to death is because of the human's proximity." Harad darkly angled his chin to look down at the smaller Ape past his pauldron. "I think he's just about to get outside of earshot."

"…Oi, if ya wanted me ta bugger off, ya coulda just said." Palmet frowned, scratching Meep's tentacles as he waddled off after the trio. "I realize and shite that we're all formeh enemies and whatnot, but do they realleh have ta be so rude, Meep?"

"**_Meep._**"

"I kno! Rattin scraps that one, worser off then I ever realleh ave witnessed."

"…Do Ignitia's orders stand, sir?" Torrdonal gulped. "I-I haven't been home in a long time and-"

"Get out of my site, Torrdonal." Harad flashed a very rare, insincere smile. The water dragon bowed and zipped into the air without another word. Harad looked back at the doorway and huffed, muttering to himself. "Dragons aren't meant to bicker amongst each other like squabbling rats. Maybe the alien's appearance really _is_ the sign of the apocalypse. Look at what our people have become."

Something about that sentence tasted foul. But then again, no so unfamiliar either. Malefora _had_ been around for centuries, after all.

Harad opened his wings and took off with a single, cracking flap.

* * *

[🐉]

Spyra was inconsolable the whole walk. Everywhere they went, she battered Ignitia with questions such as:

"_What's that do?_"

"_What's that for?_"

"_You can actually _eat_ that?! Can I get some?!_"

"_How many dragons live here?_"

…On and on and _on._

The Fallen loved hearing her talk and even he was getting exhausted, not just because of the strain on his bandaged legs.

"Warfang is considered the birthplace of dragonkind in the Realms proper." Ignitia explained, trotting beside the Fallen as they moved down a wide street flanked by commonhouses, and business stalls lining the under-atriums making their foundations. "During ancient times, dragons primarily maintained their own fiefdoms through the use of _lairs. _Back then, each dragon had their own spot of land that they hunted in, patrolled and owned, and fighting was frequent. Most of us do not fancy that lifestyle these days, especially since dragonkind's alliance with the Moles."

"What, the little furry dudes wandering around all over?" Spyra watched as a cluster of Mole citizens quickly stepped out of the party's way, gawking at her and the Fallen behind spectacles and golden goggle-setups. "What do they got that's so special? The dragons are the centerpiece here!"

"Do not be so sure, for looks are deceiving, young one." Ignitia hummed. "It was the Moles who first taught us the ability to create urban infrastructure, and it was they who were instrumental in helping us perfect our stoneworking capabilities. All of what you see around us, the buildings, the spires and the defense walls would have been impossible without their exceedingly bright intellects. They may be small, but one Mole engineer can redefine a civilization if given the chance."

"They're industrious." The Fallen nodded, his eyes scanning over a pair of Mole soldiers who had stepped to the side of the road to watch, more specifically, he was eyeing the pair of golden plated flintlock rifles in their little paws. "Cynder wasn't the only one with gunpowder here."

"Certainly not." Ignitia shook her head. "Cynder merely took the basic knowledge the North has possessed since Warfang's construction centuries ago. The brute application the Apes fashioned speaks miles of their own effectiveness. It's really quite sad."

"Yeh, me and the lads used ta keep a tally of workplace incidents up on the wall in one of them barracks blocks." Palmet dug in his ear as he waddled behind then, earning many derisive and hateful looks from citizens passing them. "We got ta twenty-six ovva the last month we did! Luckily I nevva got chosen for blast-stick duty. Visigoth always let the Apes that were the stupidest or weakest go inta those roles. I was too good fer them buggas methinks."

"Good thing too, or I'd be short a butler." The Fallen patted the blades hanging from his hips and gave the Ape a thumbs up. "Excellent sheen you worked on the gear, by the way."

"Aw, it was nuthin, Master, I always fancied the rag and cleana myself." Palmet fiddled. "_Oi,_ boss, they're sellin _biscuits_ at dat stand! C-Can I…?"

"Can he?" The Fallen creased a brow for Ignitia.

"Stay close, Ape, so that you aren't accosted by unfamiliar guards." She sighed. Palmet cheered and bounded off, Meep swinging like a loose rag from his mane fur.

"Apes seem to have a globally bad rep." The Fallen offhandedly commented.

"They were one of Malefora's force elements during the last continental invasion, particularly the tribes of Chieftain Visigoth and Vandal." Ignitia explained. "Many souls here have not forgotten the horrors they committed in the Dragon Realms, and never will."

"**_What is that._**"

The whole party stopped when Spyra went stiff like a board. Her eyes were fixed on one of the market carts pulled up with the wooden stands. There was a sign hung over the large wheel that read: '_Candy' _–in scrawled letters. A Mole wearing a dainty chef's hat and a monocle dropped a tray he'd been holding when he saw that the purple dragon of legend was locked onto his cart like a homing torpedo.

Spyra almost teleported, in the blink of an eye she had her forepaws on the counter, her tail going wild as she stared at a particular product among the small tray boards lined on the cart. There was a formation of pink, plush candies the size of a thumbprint each stacked in a tray. The dragoness was looking at them like they were a gate to some paradise she'd been denied.

"_Hey. Hey, market-guy._" Spyra didn't even look at the Mole candy-maker as she spoke. "_What is that. What is that, man. Tell me. Smells-_" She wiggled her snout, snorting, making the candy-maker jump when a lick of flame spat and died in front of her face. "-_smells real good…_"

The candy-maker opened his mouth but couldn't speak. Ignitia trotted over, warmly smiling as she sat in front of the cart beside her.

"How much for a cream-covered strawberry, sir?" She politely asked, reaching back to dig in her hipsash.

"_Cream covered strawberry._" Spyra might as well have been uttering words carved into a holy grail. "_Ohmygawdtheylooksogood…_"

"On the house." The Mole finally sputtered, pushing the whole tray at them across the counter. "T-Take it. Fresh batch."

"Oh, please sir, there's no need, I have coin right-" Ignitia started.

"_No._ No it's okay." The Mole weakly smiled. "Anything for the Purple Dragon. I-I'm just glad the Wings finally found you."

"That's very generous of you, but I insist-"

"_YEAHAH-!_" Spyra snatched the whole tray and shoved a pawful of the candies in her snout before anyone could blink. She sat on the street and chewed noisily, her eyes rolling back into her head, much the same way they tended to do when the Fallen was lewdly servicing her. "…_Mmmmfffff~…_" She swallowed, pink bits clinging to her fangs and marring her chops. "_Spyra _real_ likey….~_"

"You can have anything you like too, ma'am, I'm not privy on charging a Guardian." The candy-maker watched Spyra with fascination, only half-looking at the older dragoness.

"Your kindness is boundless." Ignitia sighed, embarrassed, slipping a wad of coins onto the counter when the candy-maker wasn't looking. "Oh, Fallen? Would you care to try something?"

"Fallen? What's fallen, I hav-" The candy-maker went pale as the human limped over to the cart and offered him a quick smirk before scanning the goods.

"…_How you doing_..." The Fallen muttered, picking out a small chocolate truffle and popping it in his mouth. "Is bartering a thing here? I have all kinds of gear…"

"It's yours." The candy-maker seemed less shocked now and more curious as he bent to gaze at the taller human from the chin of his cart sign, which was level with the Fallen's forehead. "…You don't mind me asking, but what exactly _are_ you?"

"_He's an alien that fell from the sky._" Spyra muffled, shoveling her strawberry candies like they were going out of style.

The candy-maker was suddenly possessed with a- '.' –sort of expression, before Ignitia whisked the two of them away.

"Thank you again, sir." She called back as they took to the street again. "…I had a nagging suspicion you had a sweet-fang, Spyra."

Spyra muffled something as she shoved the tray into the Fallen's hands.

"_Holdthis._" –She barely uttered, before snagging another pawful and gorging. "_Can'twalk…onlythree…_"

"I understand." The Fallen chuckled, keeping the tray by his belly as Spyra leisurely plucked at her will between steps. He looked at some of the striking, stone spires towering around them, and the dragons zipping back and forth through the beautiful sky. "I can see why you were so eager to come home."

"It's wonderful here, you can almost forget how crowded it is." Ignitia said cheerfully. "Where you come from, Fallen, are there not cities as well? Judging from those pods in Cynder's observatory, your people have access to unprecedented engineers."

"I don't know where I _came from_ per-say, but other worlds have places like this, yes." He glanced at her, still focused on the scenery, a passing marble statue of a dragon regally poised atop a pedestal, a commonhouse whose entire two-story front had been sculpted to bear a draconic coat of arms detailed with trims of bronze, its windows built in accordance with the patterns. "…Places _like it,_ not _it_ though, this…"

The Fallen's sentence trailed to nothing, and he merely smiled again.

"Maybe on a low-day at the academy, I could give you a guided tour." She suggested, regarding him past her dainty, finned and umber scaled shoulder. Her amber eyes trailed down his body. "Counting on your injuries healing up, of course."

"That sounds like a plan." The Fallen chuckled as Spyra picked the tray in his hand clean. "Spyra was telling me about some of the lifestyle and benefits of being a Guardian you explained to her last night."

"All in a good light I hope…" Ignitia hummed, her mood dampening as she remembered the conversation in detail.

"I respect it, what you do and how you do it. My _sensei _lives a very similar lifestyle in a mountain range. I lived that way for a long time, finding my own inner strength and molding it into something that I could use to reconstruct myself."

"It's not an easy thing to do."

"_No,_ not in the slightest." His shoulders hopped. "It did almost kill me. Literally."

"Wha we talkin bout this time wit killing? Killing's always good fer some small talk." Palmet crunched on a biscuit clenched in his paw as he waddled up beside them, the Ape's little yellow eyes alight with intrigue.

"You stole that, didn't you." The Fallen creased his lip.

"Wha? None whatsoevva, boss! I simpleh walked up to the nice little Mole-man behind the stand, and I went ta inquire about them biscuits he had at the forefront rightly." Palmet spat crumbs as he talked, dragging a knuckle on the cobblestone beside him. "Instead of giving me some info like I asked abou peacefully, he up and screamed his little head off and ran out! _Fled,_ kapoot business-venture he did! Ran away with his little arms in the air and wavin all panicked."

The Ape shrugged and bit off a little bit of the biscuit to hand to Meep.

"Guess peepol round these parts fink I'm scary or somethin."

"We're here." Ignitia said. "Look."

The Dragon Academy was physically a level lower than the street, linked on four sides by stairwells and ringed by a large plaza. The academy itself was a self-contained community by the looks of it. It sat as an island ringed by a low wall, and surrounded by a wide, blue-watered artificial mote. Greenery and trees lush with leaves covered the island's roughly square mass, penning in a series of spread out buildings making the academy itself.

"…_Wow…_" A strawberry candy slipped out of Spyra's mouth as she gawked. "…_that's_ the academy?"

"Yes it is, the birthplace of all of Warfang's warriors, and the Realms overall." Ignitia sounded giddy, her wings preening slightly and her tail wagging. She was obviously excited to return. But then, her face paled a little. "…_All the work that's built up since I left…_"

"That's a pain I've felt more than I want to admit." The Fallen chuckled. His gaze was locked on the academy itself, however.

Yes, it was beautiful and a massive architectural feat for a world still without electricity, but the taste of _fortification_ ringing from the place put him off slightly.

"I wanna' go inside!" Spyra wrapped her tail around his wrist and jolted forwards, the empty tray pattering on the street as he lost it and stumbled after her. "_Last one there has to lick the other's feet!_"

The Fallen gasped. What if she wasn't kidding?

Spyra didn't wear shoes.

* * *

[🐉]


	27. Chapter 26 - Comfy Nests and Dark Gems

**Dragon(s)layer**

**26**

* * *

**Comfy Nests and Dark Gems**

* * *

_**{Black Mesa Soundtrack: Black Mesa Theme - Mesa Remix}**_

* * *

"_Justice._"

The glass orb slipped from her paw and shattered on the ground.

**_Crash~!_**

Cynder's eyes snapped open, and the endless silence was right there to greet her. She huffed and lazily rolled onto her back in the rich, crimson bedding of her nest. All sleep left her system with haste, a high opposite face for its slow, creeping arrival that it had overtaken her with. Cynder didn't even remember closing her eyes.

She stared holes in the chamber ceiling, batting her paws at nothingness. Never before had she ever felt this directionless and lost. She had always been at war with the world. But right now it felt like the whole world had _beaten_ and then forgotten about her. She was a slagged corpse left in the dust, unremembered, and irrelevant.

She spat out a tiny bulb of Shadow flame and watched as it arced above her nesting. Just before it could come back down onto her breast, she reached out with two talons and kept them in a hook just under the flame nub's path. In midair, the little black ulcer stopped and levitated between her clawnails. Cynder idly flexed her fingers and watched the bulb grow to the size of her head, a pulsating, inky sun with black tendrils snapping all around it.

She rotated the shadow-sphere and jerked her wrist, sending it up, and then down again, and repeating.

Her castle would keep her away from it all.

Look at her, right now, at this moment, _playing_ with her mutations that were steadily killing her...

That was why she had wanted to take the Fallen here with her. Together, they could've devised a way to fix her, and they could have lived here. Cynder didn't remember her nesting ever feeling so empty and cold. She wanted another body in the cushions with her. She wanted the Fallen.

Cynder slapped her chops, trying to remember how he had tasted. Even though it was recent, it was a challenge. That sampling of maddening passion she'd gotten had effectively ruined her naivety of the flesh. She couldn't keep living without having something to cling on to, something from the only point of goodness in her whole past…

_The past._

The idea struck her like lightning.

Cynder snapped her talons and the flame ball popped away to nothingness. Gears in her mind turned and turned…

_Yes._

That could work, she considered, craning a lithe forearm over to delicately pinch the neck of the wine glass she had kept by the nestside table. She sipped its blood-red contents and rumbled at the warmth.

_Malefora gets what she wants._

_I get what I want._

_The war never ends._

_I take all the pieces for myself. The playing board is empty._

Cynder drained the last of her wine and threw herself out of the nesting. Soon, she was bustling down the twisting halls of her castle, heading to her throne room.

Her claws and their clicking echoed down the whole maze of tunnels. She chirped as she moved, just once, closing her eyes and hearing the sound bounce as she moved. It was something to detract from the twisting sensation that was choking her chest.

In her throne room, she bounded to the center of the crimson carpet, and flicked out her talon, a black pearl materializing in her palm.

She whispered into it and held it from her face, black mist washing and levitating out of it and into the air. Though there was otherwise silence aside from the harsh, low murmur of the black magic at work, Cynder narrowed her pale eyes, took a deep breath, and began to speak.

"I am not begging for forgiveness, nor am I declaring any ultimatums." She said. "The tower… it's… behind me, behind both of us."

She paused, staring into the black mist spiring from the pearl, as if she was trying to carve out shapes from the liquidy smog.

"…It's funny, because as much I may not want to believe it: twenty-five years has changed my mind into something even you didn't envision. I do not believe I have quite broken down its endpoint, or, frankly where it began…"

Cynder licked her teeth and sighed.

"I trust memory of my little incident in the mountains has not placed importance in your daily considerations, but if you wish to view the seeds of what you may call heresy, it probably lies in there, for starters.

"…_Exhaustively,_ I don't think I came prepared to say much else beyond that, not in personal terms. I did script my plan, be if only briefly. I still have Vandal and Saxony, and even if Jute is dead, his tribe will obey me." She waited in silence.

Nothing.

She continued.

"I want to rally my forces in Monkano."

"**_You were just beginning to impress me with your own poetic examination of everything, and now you've spoiled the mood with stupid plans. Do you really think Infernia is going to let you do that?_**" Malefora's tired utterings crept out from the mist finally. The smog pulsed pink with each hitch in her speech. "**_Some of the Apes are calling her the Queen of Table Scraps, and seeing as I have been so forced to reevaluate my own artifices, I'm just beginning to see the truth in their idiotic ramblings. You know, I gave _you_ everything. I favored you over so many promising, pure-born Nightkin. Infernia will never forgive me for what she views as a demotion: but a demotion I gave to __gift_**** you**_, **hatchling**._"

Cynder's mouth moved, but no sound came to light. The black dragoness clenched her mandible and glowered into the mist.

"The rallying is the _second_ part of my plan."

"**_Yes, I knew you would avoid our relationship in the discussion. You always have. Now… a plan? So you have a plan now. That is beautiful. Why don't I just entrust my entire empire to you, while I am at it? Maybe I should tell the Grublins to disarm themselves and brandish sticks too._**"

"_Mistress,_" Cynder shakily sighed when she realized how acidic the word had become to her. "the Apes are flesh shields. With the Purple Dragoness focusing her attention in the Dragon Realms, the South is undefended. I can have Saxony literally beach one of his longboats, and the Chieftain can walk onto land without threat of incident."

"**_You speak truth._**"

"Indeed I do, born from tactics you've never told another dragon on the wing or from fleet of heart in all of existence. Would you question my cunning, my Mistress?"

Malefora growled, and Cynder gasped as her head began to grow pressurized. It felt like someone was squeezing her skull.

"-_I released you._" Cynder struggled out. "You would not have been able to return without me! I will not let you molest my mind any further!"

There was a crash of thunder that rocked the whole castle. Malefora snarled and the pearl-dust turned briefly crimson. Cynder cried out and buckled on her legs, nearly dropping the pearl and collapsing onto the carpet.

"_…Mistress…_" Cynder swallowed, forcing herself to her feet. "…we have become so linked, even if you do not wish to admit it."

"**_There's nothing to admit, you ungrateful wench._**" Malefora snapped. "**_I gave you power beyond imagining. You repay me with a knife in my tail._**"

"The _South,_" Cynder shouted. "the Apes to the South, from Monkano! Infernia will listen to _you,_ she'll listen to me as well! She always has, she always will. That is the second part of my plan."

"**_What is the first part then? Speak!_**"

"I'm flying to Daragon." She hissed, straining as beads of sweat ran down her slender snout. "The Guardians are there. You feel it, and I have felt it through you."

"**_You don't even have a means to get to them. What are you going to do? Beg them?_**"

"No," Cynder gnashed her teeth, fighting off the last strings of Malefora's magic, her tail-blade singing as it whipped. "I'm going to use them for the only thing their pitiful lives are worth to us as: they are going to become _conduits._"

"**_It was only through luck that you survived against Ignitia the last time you tried this._**" Malefora huffed, suddenly sounding impatient. "**_Luck, and my benevolent means of interfering._**"

"It was also through luck that Ignitia did not freeze to death_._" Cynder retorted. "Our power structure is changing, and your influence over me is waning. My powers have become something else. I'm extending a claw to you, not asking you to eat from it. Hear me out. I am going to Daragon, where I know Guardians Volteera _and_ Cyrila both have traveled to help the fighting. This has inevitably drawn Terradora in her continuous attempts to be a General. The Grublins and Orcs still recognize me as friendly. I'm going in and I'm _taking them._"

"**_Who? The Grublins? All or half of them? Do you want me to lend you a burlap sack? I would hate to see your efforts fail…_**"

"No, not the Grublins, or the Orcs. To hell with all of them." Cynder smiled grimly, ignoring the mockery. "I'm taking the _Guardians. _I am going to use them to reopen the Portal."

"**_The Portal? Why the Portal? There is no such use for it, it has already served its purpose._**" Malefora growled. "**_Besides, it is in the Iron Wastes. You and I have no hold there anymore, only the dead do._**"

"And they are precisely what will be the barrier between me, the Guardians and their would-be saviors." Cynder reasoned. "I am faster than any dragon who has ever lived. I can outrun them. I can outrun even the forces of the Iron Wastes. All I need is the _Convexus' Gem,_ with that, I can tear open a second wound into Convexity."

"**_…You want to begin a Planemeld._**" Malefora incredulously whispered. "**_If you do that, every single dark entity in the world will become nigh unstoppable, including me, including you… Why would you do this? An eternal war brews beyond _that_ horizon, and if you don't believe me, you can ask the very spirits we discuss. There are forces consumed with the same hate as us who will attempt to stop you in addition to the North. The _Fallen-_ your new obsession –will attempt to stop you too._**"

"I will give you _everything._" Cynder said, emotion tugging at her chest at the mention of the human. "I will unleash Convexity and I will turn all of us into _gods._ You can challenge whomever you wish, I will not impede you, and you are free to remake the world as you please. I no longer want a seat in that. I hate this world. I always have, and I realize now that I do not care what happens to it, as it has never cared what happens to me. My only condition: is that you let me take the Fallen. We go one way, you go the other. My service to you can finally reach a conclusion."

"….**_Mm._**" The Dark One sighed. "**_…All of this time, you work up to…?_**"

Malefora didn't know what to say. She filled in her own blanks with a crisp little laugh, followed by a grounding rumble. Cynder waited with bated breath, staring into the black mist.

"**_I see my _treatment_ has done little to reestablish your true nature._**"

"I have told this to every advisor you have sent me, to every warlord who has served under me, to every champion I have slain:" Cynder leaned closer to the misty spire, her white eyes seething with malice as the memories of mental anguish flared in her mind's eye. "_no one_ has the right to ever touch me. Never. For naught. You _will_ submit to that rule, _Mistress._"

"**_Evidently, not all._**" Malefora smirked. "**_This Fallen will be your own repudiation. Times have truly changed._**"

"Is it a deal?" Cynder growled, her voice bouncing down the empty halls of her castle. "I give you Armageddon, you give me freedom."

"**_Your loyalty to me has been a lifelong façade, hasn't it?_**"

"It's been convenient. It now no longer is." Cynder shook her head, though she sensed Malefora detected her trace dishonesty. "My mutations will allow me that without your consent. I want your _word_ now. The Convexus Gem, a second Convexity gating, the Purple Dragoness dies and I get the human. Simple."

"**_There's nothing about what you're going to do that is simple._**" Malefora chuckled. "**_If I didn't find it so appetizing, I might just put forth my own resources to stop you._**"

"With respect, my Shadowed Queen," Cynder smirked. "I would greatly enjoy seeing you try."

"**_…Zargos wasn't the only one I sent on a hidden quest._**" Malefora ground her fangs. "**_Those of Crimson-Plate were informed of their own hunt. So, I wish to add something: if you can reactivate that ancient warpway with your impromptu charges, I will send you the best unit of their number under my possession. They will be my sentries to ensure that your work is not interrupted._**"

"They must have a no-kill order for the _human,_ or no deal." Cynder snapped. "Your Commandos have no right to him. He is _mine._ The Fallen comes with me, subdued. Your Commandos can have the purple dragoness. They are not to touch him. If they do? …Well, I can always funnel the runoff…"

"**_You've been driven mad!_**" Malefora laughed. "**_Rip open the ancient Portal of Convexus, brave the wrath of that dark, unforgiving tower of hell, in the middle of the most inhospitable haunt in the world… all to destroy yourself. You stupid little hen. Do you think your body is capable of withstanding that much power? If you try to channel the _realm_ of Convexity, not just the element: you will overload your own Mana and erase yourself from spacetime. You will die._**"

"Perhaps!" Cynder's face quivered. "Perhaps I will die. Lest we forget so many other instances where such was repeated. At the Second Continental Landing, I _should've_ died. During the duel with Ignitia in the cold, bitter north: I _should've_ died. Over the Ancestral Sea in the Cloud Battles of the 5th, where over two-hundred dragons fell in the course of three hours: I _should've_ died. I cheat death, Mistress, because of how much I have longed for it. A person can never truly grasp that which captivates them the most. You needn't fret over such things. In layman's terms: _is that a chance you're willing to gamble with?_"

The black mist pulsed in silence. Malefora didn't respond. What could she say?

"…Excellent." Cynder smiled venomously. "It appears I have work to get to. But, as a last extension of your _kindness,_ my Queen… Maybe you could throw me a bone? If isn't so troubling."

"**_The mountain,_**" Malefora grumbled. "_**o**_**_ver the Solemn Pass ridging Lilith's realm. There is an army marching. I have no doubt that the _ice_ will attract a certain champion._**"

"And the scattermouthed, yellow cunt?"

"**_I believe such colors have been noted on Oversight's walls…_**" Malefora said. "**_But the Guardian of Earth? Of that even I am blind. You're on your own._**"

"Perhaps there's an advantage to losing an entire army." Cynder chuckled. "It leaves so much room for flexibility."

"**_Where are you going to do it?_**"

"I'm standing there." Cynder sweetly stated. "What better way to hook your catch if not in your own lair? They will come to me. I assure it."

* * *

[🐉]

* * *

**_{Assassin's Creed 2 OST: Home in Florence}_**

* * *

For a minute, the Fallen was concerned about how _he_ was going to get inside the campus. Ignitia was tired from the flight, and Spyra had already made it clear that she could only ride _him_ and not the other way around.

Luckily, there was a white footbridge linking over the quietly slapping moat below. Miniature gardens flanked its railings on both sides, populated with healthy green shrubs and dwarf trees with white blooms making their canopies.

Palmet started sneezing halfway down the bridge when one of the thousands of petals flowing in the wind got slurped down his nose. Ignitia had a look of disgust on her snout the whole walk thereafter as the poor Ape howled and _'achoo-ed!'_ –for ten minutes straight.

"Why don't you just fly in?" Spyra asked aloud as they came to the bridge-end. "Those little walls couldn't keep out a happenin' 'ness like me, or you either, Ignitia."

"This is an introductory entrance for our non-flying party member." The Guardian blinked.

"_Oi! _Dat wasn't plural! I may have been reduced to an alien-warlord's propeteh an all, but I still ave my identity!"

"And… I'm _happenin' _too, aren't I_?_" Ignitia awkwardly pronounced, looking hurt.

"_Mmmmmyeaahhhhbut… ehm…_" Spyra cringed. "…_y… d…_"

"Pardon?"

"…_you're… y'know… kinda…_" Spyra paused at the end of the bridge and swept a claw in the Guardian's direction.

Ignitia looked completely floored. She glanced between Spyra's paw and her bronze-plated breast, tapping around at her shoulder-fins and self-consciously checking her thick tail.

"What about me is not _happenin'?_" Ignitia incredulously put down her foot. "I am the Guardian of Flame of the draconic capital! A-And I have… very nice wings… I-I've been told…"

"That isn't the only thing that's nice." The Fallen muttered, taking advantage of Ignitia's back and sizing up her shapely, scaly rear. Palmet glanced dumbly between him and it.

"Wha am I missin, boss?" He scratched at Meep in his arms.

"Evidently: a sex drive." The Fallen raised a brow at him. "You poor, poor little man."

"And I'm well-spoken, and I've read more tomes than any other dragon alive!" Ignitia rambled, a slight flush born on her snout as she ran a paw down her chest. She stopped, and craned her eyes in thought. "I think that makes me… I suppose the terms would be _'cool',_ and _'hip'_… Yes. Yes I do believe I am quite _happenin'_."

"_Mmmmyeahbut…_" Spyra stifled a giggle. "-you're kinda'… _old_ and stuff…"

…"-_WHAT._" Ignitia squawked, her wings popping open like an inflatable mattress bursting from a fold-in closet.

**_Fwoof~!_**

-The Fallen staggered away from his arse-ogling with a grunt as a wing-joint caught him in the eye.

"-_Ow._" He announced. "_Can't see. Ow._"

"Hold on dere, boss! Lemme find ya a warm towel and a nice relaxation pillow!" Palmet scrambled over. "Jus let ole docta Palm ere take a gandah at that shiner-"

"Touch me and lose a finger." The Fallen pointed, still holding the side of his face.

"O-Old?! I-I'm only thirty-six years of age! Do you even know how long our lifespans are at their maximum? Hundreds of years! I- I am most certainly _not_ old! I'm in the prime of my cycle." Ignitia stuck her nose up matter-of-factly. She twisted around in a slow circle, displaying the curvature of her body, tail and wings for Spyra, flicking the latter out in a regal pose for emphasis. "_And_ I have been told by many that I look _young_ for my age. See how the sun rebounds off my coat? It's because I maintain _extremely tight_ personal grooming measures."

"_Tight?_" The Fallen shook his head as he gazed back at Ignitia's ass. "God damn, I bet."

Spyra had to shove a paw over her snout to stop from bursting out with laughter.

"C'mon, I was only kiddin'…" She grinned. "…_grandma._"

Ignitia scrunched her chops and spat a brief spout of fire at her, making Spyra dance back and giggle.

"…Well, being older has its advantages." The Guardian wryly smiled and resumed walking.

"Experience." The Fallen chuckled, rubbing his eye as he limped after her. Ignitia met his gaze, her face switching from a flustered expression to a flattered one.

"You pick up a thing or two." She agreed, bowing her head sheepishly.

"Yeah, and all that experience goes out the window once the crows-feet start settling in." Spyra joked, dodging a whip from Ignitia's tail. "What about you, Fallen? Is Ignitia happenin'?"

Both dragonesses and even Palmet were all looking right at him. Spyra was doing so musingly, Palmet obliviously, Ignitia however…

…Was that nervousness he detected?

"What can I say at the end of the day?" The Fallen shrugged after taking some time to think it over. "She smells as sweet as she looks. I'd have more than just a taste if she'd let me."

Palmet rubbed the back of his mane and whistled whilst trying to look away. Flame shot out of Ignitia's snout as she fixed her mortified gaze on her forepaws. It looked convincingly of embarrassment at a distance, but the Fallen could pick up the flattered smile going down her snout.

Spyra gawked. "Say_what_now?"

They came upon a small outcrop structure from the left pylon of the academy's front gates. There were a pair of golden barred fence-hinges. Quite ornate in their design too, with skeleton murals of the city in the very center that split down the middle.

Coming out of the guardhouse to the flank was a stout Mole with a black overcoat, a hunched gait, and a bulkier build. He was almost tall enough to be level with the Fallen's chest, and was face-to-face with Spyra's height. He had a pair of copper-colored goggles, and one of his burly arms was slipped under the fold of his coat, as if he sought to hide some kind of secret or a deformity.

"Madame Ignitia." He spoke with a heavily accented voice. What kind of accent? Neither the Fallen nor Spyra could deduce. It was sluggish and caused a tongue-roll on G's and, eventually, they saw, R's predominantly. "Welcome back home. I trust all is well?"

"_Hello, Locker._" Ignitia squeaked, coughing when his browline raised behind his goggles. She was pinker than a thumb recently hammered. "E-Everything's just… _fine._ Really. Lovely weather, a nice walk through the city with Spyra, and this nice male-_Fallen._"

Locker, the academy gatekeeper, stood for a moment and gazed at Ignitia, noting her strange behavior. But, judging by his demeanor, the Fallen saw him as a guy who had seen the worst of it already. Especially if he was the gatekeeper for a _schooling building._ One didn't have to journey the Multiverse to know how jobs like that went some days.

"It is good to see you in one piece, Madame." Locker flashed a grin and then frowned, examining Spyra, and then the Fallen in turn. "You bring a purple dragon, an Ape, and an alien to my gatehouse."

"_U-Uhm-_" Ignitia glanced between them. "…_yes._ _Ehm… _surprise?"

Locker bowed his head and started waddling over to the gates, evidently willing to let the whole issue slip with just a grunt under his breath.

The Mole took his hidden arm out from his coat as he neared a tiny lockbox built into the center divider. His hand there was _metal._ It was an interlocked, multijointed augmetic made of brass metal with silver trims down the palm and back. And its fingers were each topped with keys.

"Damn." Spyra muttered. "And I thought _Cynder_ could shit those..."

"Has much been happening since my departure, Locker?" Ignitia regained her composure and stalked closer as the Mole slipped his pointy-key into the box slit.

"It could be worse." The Mole shrugged, twisting and taking his hand back to hide it back under his coat. "Only _two_ of the temporary chaperones officially quit."

"Officially? And I only hired three."

"Yes, the last one did not put it in writing." The Mole chuckled, pushing the massive gates aside and stepping out of the way. "The students have become very accurate with parchment spit-balls and paper-dragons."

"Oh, those hatchlings. A Guardian's work is never done..." Ignitia clicked her tongue as she guided the party into the courtyard ahead.

"I know you will put it all back to its rights, Madame." Locker waved his key-hand at them and started to close the gates. "But still: good luck in there. It's a bit of a zoo."

"_Roar._" Ignitia sighed. "…I'll have to check in with Bilou and make sure he was not trampled. And, _Ancestors,_ what if someone got stuck in the watering crank again? We have some drakes and hens here who are practically still smelling of eggshells! And all the paperwork, and the courses put on hold and-"

The Fallen was daring and laid a steadying hand on her shoulder. Ignitia jumped, but calmed down at his touch.

"I'm supposed to be giving both of you an introduction, and here I am stressing out." She fluffed her wings and smiled. "I'm sorry, you two. Let me try that again: welcome to the Warfang Dragon Academy!"

Ignitia stopped and swept her wing out for the grounds proper, describing everything in detail.

There were four large buildings spread across the grassy park that made the academy's grounds. A pair of rectangular dorm rooms stood side by side flanked by winding cobble paths and benched seating areas. There was a triple storied lecture hall and classroom wing with canopied walkways and castle-like expansions. Finally, the domed, oldest looking structure in the rear of the square island was the Guardian Temple and Training Ring. _That_ was where the Guardians lived, meditated and managed most administration. It was also where dragon students would be tested during elemental courses and trials.

"_That_ is where I will be training you, Spyra." Ignitia said. "Inside is a similar section like what you observed in the Dragon Temple. There are magical summoning circles that can be used to summon training dummies."

"_Summon_ them?" Spyra blinked. "What's wrong with slapping a haystack on a stick and beatin' the daylights out of it?"

"These dummies are enchanted." Ignitia explained. "They will move, act, and work together to simulate actual enemy warriors. They even sport a mean _punch,_ nothing too dangerous… but expect bruises."

Spyra looked like she was about to have an orgasm.

"Eh, this is a nice sorta place ain't it?" Palmet said to the Fallen. "Much bettah than Cynda's cesspool toweh."

"Granted, one smelled like shit and was inhabited by monkeys, and the other's pleasant and populated by civil dragons." The Fallen's eyes swept about as the scenery began to dull, and the _real_ centerpiece of the campus grounds made itself known.

_Dragons._

Lots of them.

They walked down pathways, sat on bench futons and lounged under the shade of trees. Many of them zipped from building to building on the wing, diving through special landing windows and doorways.

Many of them had seen Ignitia from a distance and had come over. Once the first few shouts about a purple dragon and a hairless ape rang out, practically a quarter of the entire student body showed up in a mob.

"Daww," Palmet groaned. "I _hate_ crowds I do. Gives ya this naggin sorta feeling, like yer naked and being pranced around like a show pony."

"Since when have you cared about self-image?" The Fallen looked at his yellow, filthy fangs.

Dragons of all different colors gathered on the grass in front of the courtyard. Yellow, blue, green, red, white, silver, gold… it was a scaly, undulating rainbow.

Taking his gaze away from Palmet, the Fallen's eyes began to pick out more choice details in the crowd that pertained more to _his_ tastes, and before he knew it, he was drooling.

_Dragonesses._

Young_ dragonesses. _Borderline jailbait.

In every color of the rainbow.

A lot of them were pretty curvy. Some looked bashful and shy when his eyes met theirs.

"Master? Ar ya cold er sumfin? Maybe I should find ya that warm towel after all." Palmet fiddled.

"I-I-I'm good." The Fallen quivered, a raging erection straining the material of his jumpsuit. He began to froth at the mouth. "_M-Must… feed..._"

"I'm in heaven." Spyra blinked, smiling as all sorts of gazes fell on her, followed by gasps and murmurings.

"Settle down please, _yes_ I have come back, and classes are resuming." Ignitia announced. "I expect all of you to carry on with your course materials and schedules _despite_ the presence of our latest addition. It is true, the Purple Dragon will be training on the grounds: _however,_" Ignitia sharply cut off the building whoops and cheers before anyone could suck in a good enough breath. "-_she is not to be distracted, harassed or heckled in any sort of fashion. _Failure to comply with these rules will result in severe punishment, punishment more severe than usual."

The dragons had all gone mostly quiet, though quite a few were standing on their hinds to get a better gander at the dragon and the human.

Spyra blushed when she noticed the various kinds of attention she was getting depending on gender. Drakes couldn't get their eyes off her. There was a dark blue one at the front of the gathering that was blatantly trying to get a better view of her haunches. The females were looking at her with a mixture of wonder, curiosity, and in a few cases _envy._

The Fallen was okay with most of the praise going to Spyra anyhow, she deserved it, _and_ it doubled to make his crotch-situation much less noticeable. He sheepishly tried to hide his slayer behind a thigh, and that only half-worked. There was a pink dragoness in the front rows who had caught sight of the unique event, and had preened her wings with a glassy look overtaking her eyes. The Fallen gave himself a mental pat on the back. He hadn't even given that one a sideways glance.

"_-I-Inside-_" The Fallen stammered, trying to get Ignitia's attention. "-_I-I need to g-go inside now please-_"

_-Before I rip off my bottoms and start spearing._

"Yeah, I'd love ta' stick around and be everyone's role model, but I'm beat." Spyra called over the noise. "-You said we were gettin' rooms here, right?"

"Follow me." Ignitia smiled warmly, her face turning sharp as she navigated them towards the students. "_Make way, all of you! _You'll have plenty of time to introduce yourselves, but until then…"

"_Look at the alien…_"

"_I thought she'd be bigger._"

"_…She's pretty._"

"_Look! A real Ape! It looks just like the dummies, only uglier…"_

"_Why is the alien walking like he's constipated?_"

-The crowd buzzed, and the Fallen did his best to just focus on the move for the Temple and nothing else. His senses were being driven over the edge. He couldn't even see straight, he couldn't-

**_Bump_**

-Startled, he looked down and saw where a dragon had failed to move in time and had brushed lightly against the Fallen's leg.

It was a light blue dragoness with a pale underbelly and horns. She had lovely crystal blue eyes that were wider than the sun and stuck to his face. Her navy-colored wings were extended fully and her tail was daggered like a board.

The Fallen leered at her like a starving gorilla. Strangely, the 'ness didn't respond to the freakish behavior, instead, her head cocked to the side and her wings settled.

"Who are you?" She asked, monotone.

"_Fallen._" He drooled, the left side of his face twitching. "_At your service, my lovely, scaly sex-nugget._"

"I'm Tsunamis." The dragoness smiled eerily, something… _off_ twinkling in her eyes. "You're so _interesting_."

"Move it, alien-boi', I've got a cramp in my haunch bigger than my fist!" Spyra nudged the lumbering human on. "Momma-Spyra needs her relaxation time!"

Tsunamis watched them both until they were long out of sight. But that twinkle in her eyes didn't quite go away. As the Fallen's aura began to worm through her scales, the young student dispersed with the rest of the awed crowd on lofty thoughts. She would not sleep easy tonight in the dorms after meeting such an intoxicating, _interesting_ creature…

* * *

[🐉]

The Guardian Temple was the largest building on the campus, and yet where the Council Building gave off an almost oppressive shadow, Spyra could detect nothing but tranquility coming from this place.

Once Ignitia had finished a long (bordering painful) description of her classroom schedules, she led them up the steps and to the bronze doors. By this point the Fallen had _somewhat_ recovered from his copious feminine draconic presence overload. He was still… _out of it,_ to a degree.

"You feelin' alright, man?" Spyra blinked at him. "You look all twitchy and shit."

"I have no-" –A jolt overtook his left eye and nose. "-_idea_ what you mean."

"Me and the lads could nevva get over this stoneywork you drags make up." Palmet examined one of the engraved walls of the temple's face, where it was carved to resemble the twisting form of a dragon. "I always said it was beyond our undehstandin and whatnot, but I gotta say I do, I ain't evva sported no kind of fascination with it until now."

"…A _quaint_ observation, Ape." Ignitia blinked at him and then pushed open the bronze doors, their hinges creaking loudly. "Anyway: come inside! Quickly, I must show you the temple interior, it is truly something to marvel at. Do watch your step, dear, the floor raises there." She brushed Spyra with her tail as they stepped into the arch. "Welcome to the Temple of the Guardians!"

The inside resembled a cathedral. It was massive, several stories tall and domed at the top. Buttresses formed rows to link to fat pillars creating dual spines down the chamber's length. Copper smelted murals covered the western and eastern walls over arrays of doorways and heavy, intricately carved shelving units stocked with urns and jars of various make. Tapestry banners draped over every buttress, each one different in color, and bearing a different iconography, ranging from Warfang's heraldry to individual unit banners and banners from other dragon holds across the realms.

A quad of huge chandeliers made of black iron hung via chain from the very center of the dome above, each hearted with a brazier bowl. One chandelier had a towering cone of fire billowing from it, the next a crackling pylon of yellow electricity that danced and flickered, another a whispering stream of cold mist rising, the last brown dust spiraling in a miniature twister.

"_Wow._" Spyra smiled, her voice bouncing around the chamber. "This is a nice crib. You guys _live_ here?"

"All four of us, yes." Ignitia backtracked and shut the doors behind them, sealing them in the complete amber-hued shade. It was cozy in here, the Fallen noted. Serene. You could close your eyes and still understand you were in a temple. "This temple is one of the oldest structures in Warfang. It was built eons ago, but no one ever listed the exact group of dragons who did so, it predates recorded history."

"…Yeah, that's cool…" Spyra was already waddling off to examine some urns. Ignitia hummed laughter at her and let her go.

"…_Reel high…_" Palmet staggered back and fell on his ass when he strained to take in the dome. "There's enuff space in here to keep an army there is!"

"Yeah, an army." The Fallen itched at his bandages, eyes sweeping over the mural taking up the west side of the chamber. Thousands of carvings interlocked across the copper surface, depicting a massive battle scene between dragons of two opposing sides. A wave of dragons poured over a wall and dueled with the other dragons atop and behind it. Teeth were chiseled, faces scrunched in furious hate and violence. The artist was skilled. He or she evoked what one was looking at. The Fallen could minutely feel his adrenaline rising just by observing the mural's length. "Not either of these armies, hopefully…"

"That's a depiction of the First Battle of Warfang." Ignitia drew by his side. "It was carved by ancient dragons using nothing but chisels and sharpening stones. It took them years, I think."

"It had to have." The Fallen stepped closer, his bandaged hand raising and hovering tentatively over the lower foot of the mural. "May I…?"

"Of course." Ignitia wandered closer, watching with intrigue as he touched the edge of a dragon in the piece and ran his fingertips down one of the ridges. "What are your thoughts on artwork, Fallen?"

"It's a variety of mediums that unify people and allow them to express themselves." He glanced at her. "Hopefully without judgment hot on their tails. And it's a great method of recording the past. It makes it harder for people to forget when ancient ancestors' faces are literally looking down at you from the hall."

Ignitia only answered him with a little sound of acknowledgment. She trotted even closer and laid her paw on the metal herself, appreciating the complexity.

"…That's very deep." She said after a moment. When he looked at her, she shrugged. "You are well-spoken, is all I'm saying. Most students here have never really grasped just the weight of where they are. I know this place is a school, and it's operated like that, but it is also a piece of our history. Just as much as those records recovered from Cynder."

"I guess the first thing I'd say: is that I've seen a lot of the best good, and worst bad, things that create a lot of emotional energy. Creating is a funnel for that kind of power." The Fallen twirled his hand. "More-or-less. But you have to wonder where any civilization would be without its most passionate citizens. Artists, writers and other intellectuals are the heart of that."

"Y-Yes." Ignitia blinked, impressed. "I've probably read a thousand such works on the subject of societal hierarchy and composition. Have you… have you studied this as well?"

"I've kind of been forced to." The Fallen rubbed the back of his neck.

"You are a very complex creature."

"I turn heads, I'll offer that much."

**_Crash~! _**–went an urn.

"-_I didn't do it! The Ape did it!_" Spyra called.

"_Oi! That's a falsity that is!_"

"This place really is beautiful. It has an…_ ancient_ feel to it." The Fallen looked around at the chamber. Ignitia cocked a brow.

"Ancient?"

"-Uhm, more of a term from where I come from. Listen, I don't mean to rush you at all, but, about these bandages and about the lodging…"

"_Oh,_ yes of course." Ignitia put a paw on her forehead and clicked her tongue. "I'm forgetting the last twenty-four hours it seems. It's just that I am very happy to finally be back. I really did miss the academy."

"You seem passionate about your work." He fell into step beside her and away from the mural.

"I get by." She leaned closer and winked at him. "_Experience,_ as you said."

"What does _this_ do?" **_Crash~! _**"-Oh _damn it._ Sorry, Ignitia! I… uh… t-the Ape, he's completely out of control. Can I set him on fire?"

"_Buggas to that! I'm bein framed!_"

"**_Meep!_**"

"-_AhhHAHha-! Get that thing away from me, dude, or I'll roast it!_"

"_I knew it wen I furst saw ya, purple drag! Yer nothing but a big ole meanie-pantaloons you are! I condemn ya!_"

"_Hey, buddo', ya' see this? K__iss my tail!_"

"You really traveled the whole swamp with Spyra, _by yourself?_" Ignitia gasped as they passed into a hallway. "She's very… _feisty._"

"She's energetic." The Fallen shrugged, wincing when the bandages crinkled. "But coming down where I did was probably the best thing that could've happened. I'm… close with her."

"So I have been told." Ignitia had a weird look on her snout, something of a cross between a sultry grin and frown. "Fallen, I want to level with you, while we have a moment to ourselves…"

"Of course. Tell me."

"I do not fully understand the extents of your relationship with Spyra, and despite my initial, ahem, _discomfort_ about it, I really do respect yours and her wishes. If you two have found something, despite the… _differences,_ then I am happy for you."

"People don't cross that line here often?"

"Line? What do you-" Ignitia blushed. "-_Oh,_ that. Well… it isn't exactly unheard of. Some dragons are… _eccentric,_ a-and some Moles too… The problem is the lack of compatibility. You're the first visitor to Warfang I've witnessed not of Dragonkin who has proven even size and stature with us."

Ignitia realized what she was saying, and somehow the flush grew brighter. The Fallen nudged her shoulder teasingly, and all of her fins across her body stuck up at once, like hairs in the cold.

"N-Not that I'm suggesting anything." She snapped. "Oh, stop smiling like that, you know what I mean…"

"Just a little spice to your cinnamon?" He smelled her scent wafting in the air around her.

"You are a devious little thing, aren't you?"

"_Adventurous,_ maybe a little insane." They came to a doorway, a heavy iron-rimmed door large enough for a dragon to walk through.

Ignitia pawed it open, revealing a sizable room beyond. A nest made of fluffed cushions and sheets was neatly prepared in the rear, surrounded by end tables, little curio cabinets and a dragon-sized washing tub embedded in the floor. A window overlooked the rear flank of the campus and the moat outside, bartered only by faintly drab curtains billowing from the slight breeze coming in. There was a shelving unit set up against the wall, and its interior was taken up with…

"Rocks?" The Fallen asked, hobbling into the room and examining the large collection against the east wall.

"_Yes,_ you'll have to excuse the taste in decoration." Ignitia tiredly sighed, eyes scanning lazily about little crystalline quartz clusters melted into clay bowls that acted as décor on many of the tables and curios. "My sister, Terradora, follows the greatest example of us. Her passions are with the earth and stone. Could you tell?"

"Not at all." The Fallen picked up a quartz crystal, colored midnight purple from the shelf, turning it in his fingers to watch the window light glint off its flanks. There were all kinds of rocks there. Pink, blue, gray, black, white, shiny, dull, smooth, jagged…

Talk about dedication to the hobby.

"I thought Terradora was supposed to be this badass warrior type." The Fallen put the crystal down and walked over to the window, sifting a curtain over and peering at the campus and moat. "And, wait a minute: you're giving me _her_ room? What if she comes back?"

"Terradora has not walked the halls of this temple in months." Ignitia smiled sadly, preening her wings as she sat in the center of the room. "It's not out of spite that I'd offer her personal space, but it is… -Ahem, I was about to say _convenient,_ but really, I've kept her chambers organized for long enough. This is practically _my_ second room by now."

The Fallen chuckled and moved over to the nesting, kneeling and feeling the sheets.

"It feels like a bed." He murmured. "Spyra's nesting was nice, but to have an actual bed? I haven't slept in a real bed in months."

"I could have the Moles fashion you a mattress if dragon-bedding isn't suitabl-"

"No, this is fine. I've found I prefer nesting anyhow." He said. "Lets me get in touch with my inner dragon."

"Inner dragon?" Ignitia laughed. "What in the world do you mean?"

"I've always coped better with dragons than my own people, or any other people for that matter." The Fallen twisted around, sighing in pleasure as he sank into the cushions of Terradora's nesting, and splayed his arms and legs out as he wiggled into the center. He yawned, his eyes turning heavy. "…It's just… _who I am, really, on the inside… I've always loved dragonsss…_"

Quiet snoring.

Ignitia hummed and watched the human rest. The glare from the window illuminated the edges of his athletic form. The Guardian found herself ogling as her amber eyes traced down his thin muscles, and picked out the curve in his narrow hips.

He was no dragon, but…

Ignitia sniffed.

…he certainly smelt as good as any drake. Actually, probably better.

_What?_

Ignitia shook her head and looked down at the floor guiltily. What was she saying? The stress must have roasted more of her brain than she had thought. Even if she had gone insane enough to consider such a taboo kind of thing as the _flesh_ with the Fallen in mind, he positively _stunk_ of Spyra. Ignitia had no doubt that the Purple Dragoness had purposefully doused every square inch of the Fallen's body with her pheromones to lay claim to him.

But, despite that feminine charge, it didn't make him any less drawing, any less… _attractive._

The Guardian huffed, sneezing a lick of soot as she turned to leave the room with her tail between her legs. The strange buzz in the back of her mind that had been going since this morning was rising in intensity. It had completely slipped her mind by this point, the possibility of him enchanting her with anything. All Ignitia could internally war with herself over now was this flame crackling in her stomach.

She felt lightheaded and strangely hypersensitive. She wanted someone to touch her, all over, and her belly was overcome with butterflies.

She hissed. A very old, forgotten feeling stabbed into her thighs like a hot knife. Ignitia leaned against the archframe and peered at her haunch, as if searching for the blade itself to be there.

Terradora's room was a perfect example of _why_ this was eliciting the panicked reaction she currently had. She was one of the four _Guardians._ She was a monk. Abstinence, penance, meditation, and the attainment of inner peace! There was no room for… for _erotica_ in any of that!

_Why erotica?_

_Because! He's…_ Ignitia went pale as snow and started chewing on her thumb, her eyes on the Fallen's chest in the nesting. _…He's so… O-Oh my. No. Nonononono…_

_Bad girl. Stop this._

She pucked her palm on her horn and growled, going back into the hallway.

"_Aw, radical! Is this our room?!_" Spyra shouldered right past the startled fire dragoness and zipped into Terradora's chamber, her tail whipping as she gazed around excitedly. "What's with all the rocks? _Eh,_ who cares. _Sweet!_ A nest!"

Spyra flapped her wings and landed right on the Fallen's gut. The poor human sounded like a mule as he was jolted awake in a horrible cry of pain.

Spyra didn't seem to notice as she draped over him and nuzzled her face into one of the cushions.

"_Oohhhyeahh luxury-class…_" She muffled. "-Hey, Fallen, isn't this the comfiest nest ever? This is better than mine back at home!"

"…_yes… it's fantastic…_" He sputtered, her footpads pressing into his chin. "…_I think you broke a rib, girlie'…_"

"I-I'll leave you two to settle in." Ignitia tore her eyes from the display and backed out of the chamber. "In the meantime, I'll bring us all a meal, and in a few hours I'll introduce Spyra to the elemental training chamber."

".._thank you, Ignitia…_" The Fallen weakly groaned over Spyra's giggling. "…_Ouch, watch where you're stepping…_"

"C'mere, human-boi', give momma-Spyra some sugah'… _Oi!_ Shut the bloody door!"

**_C-dmmp_**

Ignitia quickly shut herself out, sweat developing on her scales as she tore back from the door handle and stared at it in apprehension.

She felt…_ bothered,_ right about now. She wasn't old enough for flares like _that_ to start happening! It would be another few decades at least!

She needed air. Some space, and some cool breeze from her chamber's own window.

Yes, that sounded lovely. A moment to relax and unwind from the long journey, to take into account her-

"Uh, scuse meh, Miss Drag-Lady, but, uh… where are me and Meep supposed ta sleep exactleh?"

Ignitia almost trampled the poor Ape as she skidded to a halt. Palmet dumbly grinned up at her, his fangs yellow as piss and his eyes lit in the shade with oblivious intrigue. Meep was peering at her from the crook of his arm, undulating like a living splotch of glistening tar in his fur.

Apes truly were something else. Yet their strange blend of stupidity, curiosity and barbaric industriousness created something to be green over in all actuality. They were as ugly as they were survivable.

"…_Yes,_" Ignitia blinked, searching the hallway around her. She hadn't intended to house an _Ape._ "…_Ah,_ I know. This way."

"Right-o!" Palmet waddled close behind her. "Miss Drag-Lady, I gotta admit that you got plenteh of good energy in ya to extend yer hospitalness to someone like me. We were at war a week ago, eh? An yet here I is, movin down to me new quarterin inside yer temple! Mighty kind of ya, that."

"Don't let it go to your head. You are the Fallen's _pet,_ and so I will tolerate your stench." Ignitia darkly peered back at him. "But the moment you stick your dirty fingers where they do not belong is when you outstay your welcome. I'll have you thrown in the city dungeons on the flick of a wing, Ape, believe you me."

"I ain't got nuthin but a desire to serve my new Master I do." Palmet happily said. "Them Fallen's a ton bettah than Cyndah or the Dark Mistress. He even let me handle the explosives when we were battling in the tower! Good times, them…" He drooled a little bit, his eyes getting glassy. "…Sonuvva broad's arse I luv explosions… Are there any job openins in the city that involve demolitions?"

"Not in your dreams."

"Mm. Shame that. Maybe Meep can keep me a dreem jurnal, an I can start on that path to _lucidity dreemin,_ so I can make up my own explosions in my ead!"

Ignitia rolled her eyes and led him to a door. It was smaller than the doors to hers and the other Guardians' rooms. She pawed it open, revealing a small, flat cell.

Palmet waddled over and peered inside. There was a broom and a bucket stacked in the corner, an empty shelf gathering dust and an empty lantern on the floor that probably hadn't been lit in years. The faint stink of mildew was present, and emphasize it all, a pair of tiny moths fluttered out from the doorframe and vanished down the hall in feathery panic.

It was the room-wing's broom cubby.

"You can stay in _here._" Ignitia sourly grinned. "With the rest of the unwanted clutter. Be grateful, Ape, for the crimes your people have committed, I should have you tossed in a pit and-"

"_It's **perfect. **Absoluteleh perfect it is!_"

Ignitia's words tumbled into nonsense as Palmet's statement broke her grip on reality. She blinked dumbly.

"What did you say?"

"It's splendidness it is! I ain't evva had my own dedicated chambers before! Only the Chieftain and that mechanic-bugga he kept around had their own private quarters! This is the best day uv my life!" Palmet hurried inside, picking up the bucket and sticking it over the crown of his head, wearing the thing like it was a helmet. He muffled a cheer, and Meep slithered into the shelf, climbing on it like it was a gym-rack. "Thankye there, Drag-Lady! You've made this here Ape happeh ya have!"

"U-Uhm, t-that's- _no._" She hurried backed away when he lumbered towards her with the damned bucket still on his head, arms outstretched for a hug. "No, that will not be necessary. Just… _gah~!_" She tore away and stomped towards her own room. "Confine yourself there and do me a favor. If you touch anything in this temple, I'll strap you to a training rack and let the students use you for elemental target practice."

"Alls clear, Miss Drag-Lady!" Palmet called. "Now if'n you'll scuse meh, I've gotta take stock of my new _private_ quarters! _Ha-ha~!_"

**_Clmp! _**–he slammed the cubby door shut. Ignitia barged into her chambers with a frustrated grunt, only mellowing out when she flopped into her amber sheeted nesting and lye there for a while.

_…So soft…_

Her foul mood bled from her, and she sighed in content. Turning onto her back, the Guardian pawed the air and looked around her room dotingly. The whole thing was colored and decorated to look like one continuous ream of bronze fire. The curtains were blazing umber, the sheets and cushions crimson with golden trims, the meditation station carved from marble to be a roaring bonfire flame just ahead of the brown mat-carpet laid out at its feet.

Ignitia shut her eyes when she remembered that technically, she still had to go get the party food from the lecture wing.

It could wait.

All of this mental chaos had made her tired, and a dragoness needed her beauty naps when the time came…

It was good to be home.

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[🐉]


	28. Chapter 27 - Bad Twist

**Dragon(s)layer**

**27**

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**Bad Twist**

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The Fallen immediately decided that dragons here knew quite a bit more about food than dragon_flies._ Call him judgmental. That sliced pork was so good that he wouldn't have given a shit.

"I wasn't able to find you _everything_ that I wanted to, but think of this as a _ninety-percent_ total sampler." Ignitia chuckled, watching happily as Spyra dove head-first into a bowl of beef and noodles. Gravy flew everywhere, and when she pulled back, her purple face was bulging at the cheeks and dripping brown. Ignitia grimaced, like a mother would a messy baby in their high-chair. "Someone likes the staff's cooking, I see."

"_Mmhmm. I's gud._" Spyra muffled, ignoring the barbed fork and knife brought in for her and using her paws.

Ignitia laughed and nudged another plate closer to her. There was an array of dishes she'd brought on a chain tray big enough to hold a whole mule. The Fallen's head was still spinning at how strong the Guardian was under all that matronly softness.

"Thank you." He said lowly when the dragoness handed him a plate of sliced meat. An experimental bite told him it was beef. High-quality stuff too, at least for what was supposed to be a school…

"The dragons who pass through here are taking their first steps into probably the most important jobs of their lives: being a warrior for the Dragon Realms. Those who stay and work hard deserve at least a good meal." Ignitia explained when he quizzed her on this. "It _is_ a good meal I hope?"

"Definitely." He nodded. "Have you heard anything from the Council? Or about Morinth?"

"I expect the Councilors will be taking the time to mull over everything they've heard, and to compile messengers to tell all of those who weren't present. There _is_ still a war going on." Ignitia sighed. "And Morinth should be awaiting both of you at the Castle. Taliopia did most of the work for the healers there already, so I hardly think getting her back on her feet will prove to be an issue. I wouldn't worry about her, Fallen, she's in capable claws. Warfang has the best doctors in the world."

With that, she bit the rein of the chain-tray and backed out of the doorframe, pausing to ask: "_Ish Terradora's room acsheptable for boff uv yu?_"

"It's very nice." He leaned back into the nesting, blinking when Spyra tipped a plate over and proceeded to unhinge her jaws to allow a whole avalanche of mashed potatoes to slide down her gullet.

Frightening.

"…It's, uhm… _roomy._"

Ignitia hummed, pleased, and left.

The Fallen had to get used to the slightly larger silverware (seeing as they were dragon-sized) but acquainted well enough. He chewed idly as he watched Spyra practically smother herself next in a plate of spiced maize bits.

For someone actually a little smaller than him, she had an appetite that could bench half the city.

"_Isn't this great?_" She asked, mouth-full, gravy dripping off her cheeks.

"Chew." He dabbed at her face with a napkin.

Later on, he peeled himself out of the bandages and set about cleaning. Sleeping in a swamp hadn't left much for being grateful for.

"I kinda' can't believe it." Spyra admitted, her eyes glistening as they swept around the details outside the window sill. There was a small mountain of discarded copper dishware beside her as she lounged on the nest. "We're actually in Warfang."

"You've said. Probably a hundred times too." The Fallen mumbled, dripping wet as he stepped out from the little wash-basin tucked away in the room's corner. By little of course, this meant in comparison to a dragoness of Terradora's notably bulky stature. The bloody tub could fit four of him.

At least Warfang had plumbing on top of good food.

He was concerned about that upon arrival, flashbacks of less pleasant (and more stinky) times burning themselves painfully in the backs of his retinas. Generally speaking, the older the realms, the older the techniques… Thankfully, the Dragon Realms seemed to not follow that example.

Drying off was a pain in the ballsack. It was all gentle pats, dabs and air-drying. The damage made any speed painful and impossible.

"_Ouch._" He mumbled, carefully applying fresh dressing wraps to the riddling network of bruises patchworking his limbs. His face looked like someone had spilled blueberry juice and let it dry between his eyes and on the bridge of his nose. A glance in the little mirror in Terradora's bath nook told him _that_ horror-story. That Orc assassin had really fucked him up.

_What a time to use up all the regen-injections…_

Grumbling, the Fallen spent even longer getting the wraps back on that Spyra had jokingly said made him look like a mummy. He hadn't realized the draft he'd felt with them off even briefly.

"We never got a time from Taliopia." He blinked, looking at Spyra across the room. "You think we should head over sooner or later? Morinth should be pretty good to go like Ignitia said, I _did_ give her the last of my regen-needles…"

"…_Warfang…_" Spyra was smiling like a dope as she lounged in Terradora's nesting breast-first, eyes still locked out that stupid window and the sunny campus outside. The Fallen huffed.

"What's wrong?"

"_Nothing!_ Nothing." She startled, her tail whipping. She waved a dismissive paw. "I'm just enjoying the view. I don't wanna' explore this whole, gigantic, ten-times-bigger-than-my-only-little-world place that I've been dying to see for weeks at all. Nah. Totally content and shit… sitting here… _rotting…_" She deflated like a popped balloon, flicking a crumb off of an emptied plate.

"If you want to see it so badly, why don't you just go? You don't need my permission, and I'm sure Ignitia's fine letting you roam around for a little while."

"_Really?!_" She jolted up like an excited fox, eyes dilating.

"I don't see why not-"

"_This is why you're my fuckbuddy~._" He rocked on his heels as a purple and scaly sticker magnetized over his hips and clutched there against the towel with a wet _slap!_ Spyra nuzzled her snout into his navel and grinned cheaply up at him. "You're the best, Fallen, even if you're wetter than me."

"I-I-"

"_Say,_ why don't you come with me? I can hold off on the flyin' if'n it means I get to cruise dragonville with my boi-toy on foot!" She chortled, kneading her talons into his flesh. Her serpentine tongue flicked over his stomach, making him shudder. Spyra giggled. "Maybe we could be daredevils and screw behind a fountain and see how long it takes someone to notice."

The Fallen had a quick retort but dropped it in place of a very serious expression. He glared outside and creased his lip.

"Such glorious things as derg-puss are unworthy of mortal eyes…"

"_You say somethin', stud?_" Spyra muffled, fishing out his dick from the inner lining of the towel and giving it a few pumps in her paw. It flopped around like a creamy noodle, booping her in the snout as she started to twirl her tongue over the smooth crown. "…_Mmmmfff~… Hey,_ random question, but being around all these dragons has me wonderin'… what do ya' think drake cocks look like?"

"Not as good as mine, obviously." He looked at her funny.

"True that. _Hey_," Spyra clung to him even tighter, squirreling up his stomach to hook on his shoulders and pull her face up to his. "maybe I could make you my bitch before we hit the town and totally wreck Terradora's room with a wrestling match. Y'know where you hump me instead of headlocking me."

"You don't even know this person and you want to shag in their bed? And what about exploring?"

"The city ain't going anywhere. And: I'll shag _anywhere_ with you." She batted her eyes and licked him on the bridge of his nose. "I'll go easy, I know you're hurtin' since the swamp…"

"It's dull, at least." He sighed, holding her. "I can't wrap my head around it all. Cynder, the other fortresses Malefora controls, and all the nonsense in this Avalar place… It's a bit overwhelming."

"You told me you've been through worse anyhow, no biggie'." Spyra slid down his chest and plopped on the floor, grinning manically as she jerked him to hardness, giving him those purple bedroom-eyes he had become hooked on as she dawdled her tongue down his organ's rounded flank like it was a popsicle. "_…This though… Mmmmyeah, this here's a _real_ biggie he is, mmhahaa~…._"

"What if Ignitia walks in and pulls a Taliopia? And don't just say: 'I ain't stopping' –again, because you see how that worked out. You're insatiable."

"I just found out about this shit, dude, and, well… Spyra _likey, _she _real real likey…~_"

The human grunted as she parted her muzzle and gummed across the side of his cock, rumbling happily as her dragon-licker flicked and coiled about its twitching underside and the merger of his sack. The towel whispered to the floor and the Fallen settled on his heels, grunting as his back briefly complained before he channeled out his wounds and focused on his groin.

Spyra muffled a growl and slurped him into her snout, puckering her chops and sloppily whipping her tongue everywhere to take in every little bit of his salty taste. She'd been meaning to eat him for days, and she had just kept running out of time. Prolonged mating sprees were hard to get when people were fucking interrupting you every five seconds to save the world…

Stupid world.

Distracting her from her tasty human-meatsicle.

Well, not right now. They had time.

Spyra closed her eyes, her face contorting in concentration as she slowly dragged her mouth back and let his rod slide out just behind the midpoint, its length glistening and dripping with her thick spit. The Fallen grunted, shivering as she paused with his crown still poking into the roof of her mouth.

For just a second, he was given a stirring view of the Purple Dragoness, the savior of this world, on all fours, bent over with her supple hips in the air, catching the glare from the sunlight dappling in through the window. Somehow she kept finding angles to make her seem even more pretty than she was moments ago.

When the Fallen shuddered, she glanced at him briefly, and _winked,_ cheeks bulging.

She hadn't exactly done this before...

But, as the saying went: balls to the wall. Good thing she didn't have any, and if she threw up, well, he was a forgiving sort and there was a washroom ten feet away! So it was a win win.

He grunted when she parted her jaws and slid her snout down until her nose poofed into the little dusting of pubic hair foresting his crotch. The Fallen's blade poked her in the back of her throat. Her long neck walloped like a garden hose receiving a fresh water line. She gagged and the reflux noise wetly warbled around his meat. Dragon saliva spattered on his thighs and dripped onto the floor in hushed patters.

Opening an eye, she gazed up at his stupefied expression and muffled a giggle around him. She carefully slid him out and went down again, beginning to bob her head.

_Never thought I'd be here like this,_ Spyra suddenly (at perhaps the strangest of times) was struck with serious thought as she gagged on the Fallen's draconic puss-slayer. _In the middle of some giant dragon city, sucking off an alien. Where'd the wormhole open up and why can't I remember getting thrown in?_

She cast the awkwardness away and focused on slurping around the penis she was corndogging like a desperate sow deprived of passion over a millennium.

Holy fuck this was _good._ Every time she did anything with him it was heavy, and steamy and _hot!_

God _damn_, she must've hit a lottery somewhere!

Going from what she was to _this?_ Totally worth it, dick-sucking aside. She volunteered, nothing was forced. It was all consensual and badass. Slaughtering armies by day, rutting until the walls cracked by night. She could live like that forever.

Her and her human.

_And not that tattooed slut._

Spyra refluxed again as she drove him completely into her mouth. The Fallen groaned under his breath, teetering on his heels as he threatened to topple over. Absentmindedly, Spyra's tail whipped around and yanked over his perky butt leaf-first to keep him steady for her as she sucked his clean-smelling flesh.

Why was _Cynder_ suddenly coming back to her? That confused wrist-slicer wasn't worth the time. Besides, everyone was hemming and hawing about her returning, when for all they knew, the sociopathic bitch had finally done the Realms a favor and had offed herself in the most anticlimactic way possible.

That was a tantalizing thought for Spyra. Cynder watching from beyond the grave as the Fallen dumped his hatchlings down her throat. That was delicious, figuratively and literally.

She gripped the base of his rod and started bobbing her head rapidly, wet, gagging squelches echoing around Terradora's room. The Fallen gripped her bronze horns and started following her pattern with forceful yanks. Spyra loosened her neck and let him face-fuck her. She liked it when it was rough anyway.

_Besides_, it was just another triumph where Cynder had failed.

…._Again with this!_

Why did _she_ matter right now? She was ruining the sex! Or, her mental image was ruining it…

Spyra hung her jaw open and let a congealed tsunami of gob slip out and around each thrust as she clamped her throat and twisted her tongue around his meat. The Fallen was making wheezing noises as his hips rocked faster and faster. She idly strayed a paw between her haunches and fingered her clit as reams of spittle frothed out and swung like slippery vines as they dangled from her purple chin. The room was alive with interspecies relations and steam was wafting out of her mouth as he humped into it, the heat adding to the pleasure derived from the lubrication.

She felt his sack tense up and his pole twitch. He wasn't long now. Good thing too, her neck was hurting a bit…

_Hurting where Cynder's isn't._

_Wait._

Spyra pinched an eye open, cringing as the Fallen's moans started to get louder and her gag-reflex was pinning her ass to the wall again.

But even through all that, she realized why Cynder was so on her mind.

She…

…she could _smell her._

Cynder's scent.

Spyra blinked, gagging instead of gasping when the Fallen heaved and rammed himself into her snout one last time. She undulated her golden throat as ropes of salty semen kicked out of his gland and slipped down her gullet in healthy rivulets. Twisting her tongue deftly, she squeezed every last drop from him and lapped even when they started to run dry.

Granted, he came for _awhile._ He must've been pent up with all the teasing she'd done mid-air during the flight.

But back to the issue at claw.

As he calmed down, Spyra wiggled her nose and snorted through his pubes. There was a lot to take in, but she could pick out the offender. The lingering rosy-smell of Terradora's girly soap (which she'd later mock him relentlessly over for smelling like a feminine flower patch) the natural and masculine musk he sported and the stagnant odor of her own breath.

But _there,_ wedged in with the more present scents.

_Cynder._

Spyra blinked as she slid him out of her mouth, swallowing and plopping on her haunches. Panting, the dragoness stared at his organ like it was a victual of the saddest story she'd ever laid eyes on, all the arousal swimming in her veins draining into nothingness. She gingerly took her talons out of her slit and gawked.

The Fallen huffed and let go of her horns, grabbing himself and weakly pumping out a few last twitches working down his length. Her drool was everywhere, and she tasted him even though she'd swallowed it all already. She watched his erection start to sag. It twitched pathetically in his grip, utterly spent.

"…Y-You… didn't have to do that…" He weakly laughed, bending down to touch their foreheads. He kissed her between her eyes. "…_thank you._ How about a return favor?" He placed his hands on her chest and started to roll her back onto the nest.

Wait.

No.

Hold up.

"Wait a second- hey, no- _I said WAIT!_"

He froze.

Spyra lowered her voice and forced herself to calm the building quivers wriggling through her scales. She clenched her jaw and cleared her throat, swallowing again as trace remnants of him lingered. The silence was only broken by a distant bird chirping outside the closed window. After that, it was all white.

"…Just wait a second." She said punctually, startling him.

"Are you alright?" He knelt with a pained grunt, reaching to cup her cheeks. She hissed and swatted his wrists away. "Spyra, what's the problem?"

"Y-You…. _You._" She began to stammer, her eye twitching and her back hunching as she curled further away from him and towards the nest. "_You're the p-problem._"

"…I'm sorry…? Did I do something that hurt you-"

"You smell like her." Spyra snapped. He blinked incredulously.

"Who do I smell like?"

"_Cynder._" She snarled out the name like it was a hideous batch of gruel she had vomited up. The dragoness flapped her wings and gnashed her teeth, glaring angrily at him. "I smell her on you. Her scent is on your-your… your _cock,_ man."

The Fallen stood up, and to her horror he said nothing. He just watched her blankly between the dressing wraps covering his face, his wang still deflating from the recent stimulation she'd given him.

She looked at it accusingly for a second, and then met his gaze.

"H-How? _When?_" She growled, suddenly feeling very cold. "When did this happen? When did that _bitch_ get her filthy, home-wrecking claws on ya'? Huh? Was it at the _tower? _You _fucked_ with that _thing_ during a battle? Is that it?"

"It's… _complicated._" He crossed his arms.

"Oh no, you _ain't_ pullin' that bullcrap on me, brother." Spyra snapped, the mood souring impossibly more as she stood defiantly in front of him, stomping closer until she was just ahead of his legs. "Remember one of the things we said back at the swamps?"

"We said a lot of things back there."

"Yeah, well- well-" Her jaw quivered. "-o-one of those things, i-involved t-t-t-" Spyra clenched her fangs and began to shiver, her head lowering to the floor as her ability to speak was stolen from her. She muffled a scream through her teeth and barked: "-_transparency!_"

She paused, inhaling so sharply that she squeaked. She shook herself and glared.

"We weren't supposed to be keeping _secrets._"

"No, I guess we weren't."

"Explain yourself." Spyra sniffled, trying to look tough behind a glass barricade as she roughly wristed away a few diamond tears gathering. "*_srnnfff!* Explain yourself right now._"

Red-handed.

He'd been _here_ before.

The Fallen was a master of combat technique and tactics. He had to be for the high-stress situations his meddling across the Multiverse ultimately entailed. Very few of that madness caused him to freeze up like a green rookie. But right now, he was doing exactly that.

_Déjà vu._

A brief flicker of scales blacker than night invaded his memory. Lime eyes and flippers…

He shook his head.

"…I don't know what to say." He mumbled. Spyra shrieked and stomped her front paws, rumbling the floor.

He stepped back as a yellow glow flickered in the shade, tiny bolts of lightning dancing between her fangs as she curled back her chops and sneered at him.

"**_EXPLAIN!_**" She screamed, wings preening aggressively. "Tell me why I smell her on you! I know it's her too! I remember her scent, I'd know it anywhere after everything she pulled on us, and your junk _reeks_ of it."

"I don't want to fight you." He quietly told her. "Just calm down."

"_You want me to calm down?!_" Spyra shouted, beginning to break down again. "_I'll calm down when you- you- *snnrrf!* -tell me I'm wrong._"

"Wrong about what?"

"_That m-my nose is lying to me…_" Spyra sat down on the floor, her composure finally departing. She buried her face in her paws and started quietly sobbing. "…_W-Why can't _it _be lying and n-not _you_…_"

"Spyra, I…" The Fallen knelt and crawled over the towel to her, reaching out for her. "…I can explain."

"_…Y-You're just saying that…_" She heaved, shying away when his hand brushed her wrist. "_Don't touch me._"

"Okay, I won't." He sat in front of her. "…I… I thought you knew."

"_W-What?!_" She cried, eyes red and puffy as she tore her face out from her palms and stared, awed at him. "_How would I have known that you were- were-_"

More sobs.

"…Spyra…" The Fallen held himself back from trying to embrace her, and instead bit his knuckle. "On the battlefield, when you and me first… y'know…"

"_Yeah I know!_" She sobbed. "_Of course I know about _that!_ How could I forget _that?_ Y-You made me so- so ha-happy-_" –And yet _more_ sobs. Sentences were hard to complete by this point. "Y-You told me that I _mattered to you._"

She wiped her eyes and glowered at him, her eyes sizing him up from knee to head, just like she had when they had first met in that flame-kissed crater.

"_You made me feel like a dragoness for the first time in my life. _Me! The tomboy raised by bugs in the middle of some back-ass boondocks no one in their right mind would go into! You held me, and you claimed me and-…" She went silent. "…a-and now I find out that you were lying to me… You just wanted to use me."

Her expression turned fierce.

"That's not what I was or am doin-"

"_You _USED_ me!_"

"It _wasn't a lie!_" He barked, flying to his feet, forgetting the pain of his injuries, staring at her with darkened eyes that she had only seen him give people he was killing. "_Nothing_ I have told you over the course of our little escapade has been something so fickle as a _lie._ You misunderstand. Evidently, so have _I_ misunderstood_._ Let me ask you: Weren't you listening? At all, to anything I said over the last few weeks? Did every opportunity I gave you to bail out really go over those horns of yours?"

Spyra backed up, her tears stopped flowing. She felt a cold stab in her breast as he raised his voice to her and stepped closer, using his height, and the knowledge of what he was capable of to cow her. Spyra didn't want to admit that it was working.

"Right here is _exactly_ why I kicked you down that ravine!" He cried, jamming a finger towards the window. "Do you know what it means to be a _Portaljumper? _It means seeing amazing things, amazing, unbelievable and _beautiful _things. It really does! It changes everything that you understand about life, how to live it, and how it works. I won't withhold that from you. But at the same time, it also means seeing ugly, depraved and _horrific_ things too. The blackest of nights! Decay made reality and un-life. Evil fucking things crawling out of the corners and feasting on the flesh of children and preying on all our sins! It means _all_ of those things!"

He was ranting. Spyra backed up enough that she stumbled over the foot of Terradora's bedding, scrambling back onto her heels when she briefly rolled onto her side. She crashed through the pile of plates and sent tens of them skittering across the floor loudly.

"I've been changed into someone who can never be fully loved or hated: a _duality._" He told her darkly, his face deadpanned as he lumbered closer, kicking a bowl from his path where it hit an endtable and rebounded like a spent bullet casing. "But most of all, forgetting the good and the bad, do you want to know what makes a Portaljumper who they are? Really _really_ who they are?"

"_F-Fallen…_" Spyra whimpered, jumping when her back legs touched the wall underneath the window sill. He hung over her until her breathing hitched and she began to wheeze, her purple eyes marring their own beauty with how terrified they looked. "-_P-Please stop…_"

"Portaljumpers never have one of _anything._" He answered for her, his breath puffing over her nose. He bent down and put his face into hers, locking her world down in a cold and dark cell of proverbial torment from something that may or may not have been coming for her. "It drives most of them so insane that they just _disappear_. The survival ratings for people like me are so slim, that there is some belief that I might be one of a dying kind. Hell, by this point, I might be the _sole Portaljumper._ I don't really know and I've never really cared. I've dealt with that duality my entire life. Multiple social circles, multiple cultures, multiple existences and sciences, multiple _partners._

"I told you what I was. I _love_ your kind. Do you remember that exact quote? What did you think I meant? Something innocent? Something platonic? You're smarter than that, Spyra. You're one of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life. I hardly believe that you just were _naïve._ Where you come from, people who are naïve are _food._ You are the predator, not the prey. I saw that in you even before I learned who you were, and that is bar-none.

"You want to know the truth? _Yes,_ Cynder threw herself at me. The night in the dragonfly village when she escaped? I did not stop her. I did not do that because I love her any more than I have come to love _you._ People in these realities have so much wrong. Because you have not seen the expanse of multiple fabrics of existence, you haven't come to terms with any degradation of morals. I just so happened to sacrifice my conjugal ones. There are other Portaljumpers who did so with other pleasures. They tend to be rapists, mass murderers and operators of planetary napalm-cannons. Let's all take a second to sigh in relief that I did not end up like one of them.

"This is one of so many reasons I am labeled everything from _Savior_, to _Man of Justice_, to _Murderer_ and _Champion of Sin_. It is because I am eternally trapped to be in the grayground between all the cracks that organize your lives, that determine what is right and wrong, black and white, red and blue.

"It is my Grand Quest. I journey to worlds just like yours. I preserve, and I destroy. I save, and I kill. I fall in love, and I abandon. Rarely do these things happen entirely of my own volition. Again and again I am torn away and forced into long years of things I believe just_ might_ be permanent, and are so tempting to indulge in that even scions of angels couldn't resist sating themselves. Families, _dragonesses,_ treasure, contentment and composure, beautiful realms that could've been my own personal kingdoms with wives and children beside me. Every time they come into my life, a war, an old enemy or an old friend, or plain shitty luck tear me away from them.

"You're angry because you do not understand and agree with my person. _I'm_ angry because you are free of blame! You're completely innocent! It's true! You are innocent, and you have done nothing but show me compassion, and love, and companionship, and my soul is so dead inside that I cannot feel what I know: and I know that _what_ I am, not _who_ I am was always going to wound you in a way that you might not ever recover from.

"I am angry at _myself,_ because I loath _who_ I am! Why do you think I chose the Portals? I jump because I am _running!_ I'm running from myself! And right here, right now in this very room, I have caught up to myself yet again. Such long hours of pain, suffering, adventure and _passion,_ it… it all works up to this. To _you._ Against a wall. Terrified and hateful of me. Because of what I am.

"I'm angry because I've hurt you, and I can't stop myself. Because I am an empty person, and I have known nothing but displeasure with every fiber of my being since the beginning, and I keep consuming and consuming to fill a void that is bottomless.

"You are a good soul, one who was alone, and a _dragon._ I am alone and I… I _love_ dragons. So I love you.

"Cynder seeks death, I've sought death before too. She is searching for her prince, I am searching for my princess. So I love her.

"Tens of worlds, and still this _pit_ gnaws at my innards, and my mates are torn from me whether from their own willpower, the wills of people like Malefora, or they are ripped away from me. So the duality and the void continues. It's endless. It doesn't stop, and neither do I.

"…For you? For Cynder? Ignitia even, this all remains to be seen. I can't tell you the future, Spyra, I can only tell you that with each and every soul I connect with, yours will always be at the forefront of my thoughts as have the ones before you, and I know regular people cannot understand that, nor do I ever wish them to.

"But I do wish for you to know: I would let this entire world die if it meant that I could save you."

Spyra opened her eyes. The Fallen's own were just an inch away from her. She hadn't even felt him merge their foreheads, or take her sideways so that they both had the sill facing their flanks, and she was no longer backed into a corner.

The Fallen shivered and wrenched his eyes shut as the growing moment of quiet stretched on. A sound she had never heard come from him before tore through his lips, and he jolted, like he'd been struck by something in the gut.

Spyra watched a single bead of silver land on the floor. It was followed by another, and another.

The Fallen's hands slipped from her and he collapsed onto the floor, clawing at and covering his face in silent wracks of despair that stabbed into him with icy blades and twisted. His mouth moved, but all that came out was air. He hid his eyes from her, writhing on the floor like a dying worm.

She had never seen him like this.

Pathetic. Vulnerable.

The dragoness felt more dread broiling in her chest, threatening to steal her control, send her to the floor with him, bawling her heart out. Quivering, with tears fleeing down her snout, she turned towards the sill.

"…_-I-I'm s-sorry._" He sobbed.

Wood creaked, and wind rushed. The curtains billowed and the room was drenched in an oppressive, singular quiet. He knew what had happened, but didn't uncover his tear-stained face until several minutes had passed.

The window was gaping ajar and the crisp, warm daytime air was delicately flowing inside. The sky was a pure blue, streaked with white clouds.

There was not any hint, sign or speck that suggested the color purple. All that was left was the messed nesting, and the array of plates and bowls lying all over the floor.

He reached for a fork that she hadn't used lying on the stone by his shoulder.

The Fallen's fingertips touched it. He kicked it away and began to cry again.

* * *

[🐉]

**_BM-BM-BM-BM_**

"-Yes yes, I'm coming, I'm coming…" Ignitia yawned, trotting across the temple floor as the muffled knocks rebounded in the great space. "…_Ugh,_ back for only a few hours and a Guardian can't even catch a brief beauty nap."

**_BM-BM-BM_**

"_I said I was on my way, you impatient filcher!_" She squawked.

She opened the great doors and winced when sunlight beamed in her face.

"Heavens, the students were right!"

Ignitia startled when a plaintive voice sounded loudly in front of her. The Guardian blinked a few times and squinted.

"You really are back, my lady. Thank goodness. It was becoming a bit of an animal house around here without any, ehm… _supervision._"

"_Oh,_ yes…" Ignitia sighed tiredly, forcing a smile on her muzzle. "Hello Bilou, I completely forgot to stop by your quarters and bid you greetings. I do apologize."

"It isn't a problem, ma'am, I'm always ready for the- _the… a-AH- AHCHOO~!_"

Ignitia winced when poor Bilou almost sent himself tumbling down the stairwell with that thunderous sneeze.

"Oh, Bilou, when are you ever going to get that looked at…" She huffed, pinching her snout's bridge.

"_E-Excuse me_." A pudgy, navy blue drake reached into the little canvas bag hanging over his chest and pulled out a very used handkerchief before dabbing at his snout with it. He smiled sheepishly and balled the handkerchief under his neck, his vibrant yellow eyes alight with apologies behind a large pair of black-rimmed reading spectacles perched on his snout. "I-I'm sure it'll go away soon, ma'am. It is just a cold, after all."

"No my dear Bilou, that is a _curse._"

"Pardon my speech, ma'am, but: you're telling me! _A-AH-ACHOO-~! _*snrrff* -_excuse me…_"

"I mean it literally: it's a warlock's curse that keeps consistent sickness to harry the victim. You've had it on you for the last month because you keep refusing treatment." Ignitia raised a brow, muttering offclaw: "_…and me and Cyrila still never weeded out which of the students did it…_"

"_-ACHOO~!_"

Bilou spread his dark blue wings out and caught himself from going down the stairs. He adjusted his glasses and wiped his snout.

"D-Docters… ehm… _frighten me,_ ma'am." He mumbled dejectedly.

"If you would allow _me_ to use some counter-balms, I could remove the hex in just under an hour, as I've been offering."

"M-Magic rituals frighten me more, I-I think."

_I still wonder how he ever got his job. _

"Is there something you needed, Bilou?" Ignitia sat on her haunches and stretched her wings in the doorframe tiredly. "I just got back from having a tower collapse on my head and finding out my egg never died, so if you could please-"

The Guardian blushed and cleared her throat.

"E-Egg, ma'am?" Bilou asked. "Oh! Congratulations!"

"_Stop that this instant._" She hissed, making him cuddle his canvas bag and hide behind it. "That isn't what I meant, I don't have any eggs! I'm the Guardian of _Flame_ for Ancestors' sake."

"Of course ma'am. Sorry ma'am."

"…Oh, just forget it. Personal problems can wait. Now, yes, what you needed?"

"Yes! The attendance sheets are all scratched to completion a-as requested." He reached a snot-covered paw into his canvas bag and brought out a small stack of leather-tied parchment sheets. Ignitia cringed. Bilou followed her gaze to a crusting booger on one of his talons. "…sorry, ma'am."

"I thought we tallied up attendance shortly after I departed." Ignitia turned her snout away and gestured for him to keep the bundle. "You couldn't have done all of that by yourself."

"I did."

"Oh, Bilou… that isn't healthy! What about the substitutes? I put them in charge of records of their own halls, and-"

"T-The substitutes ran away, ma'am."

"Ah. Of course I forgot about that, it's traumatizing to consider. And my little hatchling coming back must've scrambled my- _IMEAN- _the… the arrival of the Purple Dragoness! Must have… scrambled my brain a bit, _ahem,_ YES." She tumbled, smiling like a manic clown when he blinked at her. She broke the guise and grumbled. "-_Ugh… _are there any students of particular trouble I should take note of or not?"

"W-Well, there is-"

"Nobody got stuck in the well again, did they?"

"Thankfully _no_. But there have been numerous, ehm… d-disturbances." Bilou tapped on his canvas bag. "T-The brawny one?"

"You're going to have to be more specific."

"T-The one who broke my last pair of glasses and threatened to stuff my own tail in a very i-inappropriate place…"

"Ulgair." She rolled her jaw, knowing the name. "How that drake hasn't been expelled despite his own heraldry is beyond me."

"H-Having an officer as a father really makes punishment harder, ma'am. I can't pursue the matter much myself, because, well, heavens, I… I am not the confrontational type-_oh who am I kidding._ That child _terrifies_ me, ma'am." Bilou shivered, hugging his own tail. "And what he said to me still gives me nightmares…"

"I'll deal with him." She warmly smiled. "Now, try to focus on the positives. I realize the last few days have been stressful, but I need you on your talons. We have some more work to do while I get the student body back in order. How about the lesson docket?"

"Organized, ma'am. W-What about the fireworks gathering?"

"The what?"

"The fireworks gathering, for the Comet Festival? You couldn't have forgotten about that, my lady, could y-you- _ACHOO-~!_"

In fact, she had.

That was going to complicate things. But, then again, some celebration wouldn't be such a bad thing. The rally in Immortal Square had certainly given the city a much-needed morale boost. Some Mole manufactured color-rounds in the night sky would only keep peoples' spirits up.

"That's in two days." She said. "The workload's doubled then. Bilou, organize the elemental training docket and send out fliers for more replacements. Try another district where none of the prior quits lived. Maybe we'll find a naïve do-gooder or two to throw to the meat-grinder."

"Right away, ma'am." Bilou spread his wings and trotted down the steps, sneezing mid-flap and jolting roughly to the left as he took off. "-_It's good to see you back!_" –He called. Ignitia sighed and shut the door.

Poor Bilou.

"Spyra, Fallen, let's get today started!" She sang as she trotted to Terradora's room and wrapped the door once with her tail. "Spyra? Fallen? Are you both alright in ther- _Oh!_ Hello, Fallen. Where is… Spyra?"

Ignitia craned her neck to peer inside the room.

It was otherwise empty. All the cutlery and platewear was stacked neatly beside the nesting, and the window was wide open and letting in a breeze.

The Fallen was deadpanned behind his facial bandages as he quietly shut the door behind himself.

"She went for a walk." His smile vanished as quickly as it appeared. He moved past her and down towards the hall. "So what's the plan?"

Ignitia sniffed and awkwardly trailed after him. Aside from the fact that Spyra didn't come off as a 'ness into _walks_ as much as high-risk, break-neck aerodynamic speedwaying through rooftops, the human's behavior was peculiar. Hopefully, the food agreed with him. She remembered an incident years back when some fish had been undercooked, and the horrors that had followed in the lavatories that seen a whole cleaning crew on their knees…

_No,_ it couldn't have been that. The Fallen's demeanor looked more negatively impacted via _emotion,_ not gut-wise.

Still, she had to ask.

"Are you feeling well? All of the food went down alright, I hope. Or are you still just in pain?" Ignitia doted on him as they walked. "That should be one of your first stops today is to the medical wing at Castle Wyrm. Taliopia should still be there. She'll fix you right up. That female works wonders with salves."

"I know she does." He chuckled humorlessly, patting one of his dressings and staring at the floor. "I'm just a little under the weather from all that swamp-adventuring, it's nothing. By the way, where's my butler?"

"The Ape?"

"Mmhm."

"I gave him the broom closet to sleep in."

"Oh, good. For a minute I thought you had wasted a perfectly empty room on him." The Fallen grunted. "I'm interested in that training ring you were speaking about earlier today. Maybe once I'm back on my feet, you can acquaint me with that."

"I'd be honored." She smiled. "How about your journey through the city? Spyra isn't going with you?"

"No."

"Might I ask why? Is she well?"

"Look, it's-" He stopped himself.

_Complicated._

_Complicated._

_Just say fucking complic-_

"-_menstrual._" He blinked.

_Wait, what the hell did I say that for?_

Ignitia looked like a deer in headlights and almost tripped over her own paws. She gave a laugh she didn't want to make, and so it sounded trumpety and uneven, like it had come from a maniac. She coughed and clicked her tongue as she searched for words, giving off a minute- '_Oh!' –_matter-of-factly under her breath.

"_Well,_ I certainly understand the bleaker undertones to being female, but..." Her expression dropped and she blinked at him. "Are you being serious?"

"Do I look like this is a figment of my imagination?" _Even though it is, god damn it. "_Trust me, I know when a dragoness is being visited by Scarlett for that month."

"I'm sure." She coughed again as they passed the banner hall, his eyes briefly flickering over some of the heraldry, hers over his chest sneakily. "…My schedule will be quite hectic for the next few hours, but if you're willing to wait, I would be happy to fly you to the castle."

"No, I need the fresh air." He said. "Thank you, for all you've done. I imagine our little posse has proven a handful."

"It's no trouble." She lied happily. "I should be thanking _you_ for all the services you've done me without even knowing! Seeing Spyra well and alive all these years later, finally having something worth _everything_ to bring back from yet another grueling flight to the Dragon Temple? I haven't felt this alleviated and refreshed in a very long time."

"…Uhm-" _Don't praise a piece of shit like me. _"-I'm glad I could be of help to you."

"You're so modest." She purred, looking away bashfully. "Spyra is very lucky to have you."

He bit his lower lip when it quivered.

"I-Is Palmet alright to be with his own devices?"

"I don't think that Ape has physically left the cubby since I put him in it." Ignitia frowned. "He even tried to embrace me."

"_Yep,_ that's Palm'. Anyway, I'll walk the rest off." He shouldered one of the doors open before she could reach it, and together man and dragon went down the stairs and onto one of the walkways swiveling through the lush green grass.

Some passing students stopped or landed to watch the Fallen with interest. A couple who had been eating their lunch under the shade of a tree paused mid-bite for long enough that a slice of meat actually slid out from the bread the male was holding.

"If you do happen to return sooner, I will be in the main class wing organizing the new schedule dockets. Are you sure you'll be quite alright out there?" Ignitia touched his back with her wing.

"I'll be fine." He gave another flashed smile, face drooping depressively. "Let me fix my hobbling problem, and we'll discuss strategy. Spyra should start training as soon as possible if we're going to take the fight back to the enemy."

"I already have her schedule set up." Ignitia proudly beamed. "Take care, Fallen."

"You too."

* * *

[🐉]

It actually wasn't as grueling as he thought it was going to be.

Hell, _plenty_ of people were staring. Actually, probably every single slob he passed stared. But staring was fine. He was used to people gawking like a bunch of stupid pigeons circling a tossed doughnut on the street. That shit had been around even before he came hurtling from the sky.

His eyes glanced the rooftops and clouds every once and a while, hoping to catch even a hint of purple. He was left wanting the whole time.

_Ouch._

He hissed and adjusted the hem of his jumpsuit. The thing was a nightmare to have on with all the crude dressings keeping his skin together on his legs. A few blisters were just beginning to go away on his ankles from when Malefora had hit him with that fiery magic-blast back at Forlorn. Luckily, the potions and elixirs Taliopia had given him were doing at least somewhat of the same job one of his own injectors would've done, albeit slower.

That and people were all too willing to stay out of his way.

"_Mommy, mommy! Look! An alien!_"

The Fallen growled as he lumbered by, and the cute little hatchling cowered like a puppy, his gleeful expression swiping off his muzzle as he scampered over and hid behind his mother's paw.

She looked like she wanted to snap at him, but the older dragoness couldn't get by what he _was._ She was silent, staring at him with concern as he hobbled down the thinly crowded street and on his way. A family of Moles spread out like the waves before Moses when he approached.

It couldn't have been that he offended, he had just taken a damned bath.

But again, this was nothing new. There never was for him about being an untouchable.

_Underdog as always…_

Immortal Square was a chaotic mess. Here, the crowds were so thick, people actually didn't notice him until they were right on top of him.

By the twentieth surprised gasp he stopped giving a shit. There was a drake at one point who had been rushing through the masses and nearly walked right into him. The dragon saw him, shrieked like a crow that had landed anus-first on a bird-peg and barreled into a cluster of Mole basket-carriers.

The baskets all cracked open and disgorged their contents around the feet of several passersby. Unfortunately, this was a shipment from Beacon.

So all the baskets were filled with not-so-fresh _fish_.

The Fallen ignored the dreadful groans and shouts of angry victims who had gotten fish-guts on their boots. The smell was atrocious, though, and it followed him all the way to the foot of Castle Wyrm, the impressive structure towering overhead as he approached.

"For your sake, I hope your boss forwarded the memo." The Fallen growled when a pair of Mole guards appeared between him and the large, wooden, gold-barred doors leading inside the castle. "_Yes,_ I'm an alien, _no_ I'm not here to eat you. I have business, so let me inside."

"_Are there any regulations on what to do with aliens asking entry?_" He heard one Mole whisper to the other.

"Here's a regulation." The Fallen started fiddling with his jumpsuit hem. The Moles gawked as he worked his lower breaches downwards. "I have to piss like a race-horse, and if I don't get inside that castle and use the bathrooms I _know_ you have in there, I just might have an accident on your sidewalk."

"The Fallen has access to the castle, you can let him pass!"

The Fallen turned around and blinked when the fat, puffy form of Councilor Asden wattled through some of the crowd towards him. The two Mole guards bowed and parted one of the large doors as the dragon neared.

"Hello there, Fallen, Councilor Asden, at your service! Care to walk inside with me?" The fat dragon smiled through rolls of flab on his snout as he drew close to the human. The Fallen held back an urge to pinch his nose when an unpleasant smell hit him square in the jaw.

Asden didn't necessarily smell outright like body-odor, but he had a sour aroma that was in likeness to… _mayonnaise._

_Ew._

"My pleasure." The Fallen forced a smile. "Councilor, we haven't been formally introduced."

"I had no idea!" Asden laughed, his plump folds jostling with his cackles as they both passed into a large county hall whose broad ceiling was decorated with giant, hanging heraldry banners and cauldron chandeliers. Asden's voice boomed around the stringently crowded chamber. Pairs of Mole soldiers and a handful of dragon Wings paused to watch the pair all around the expanse. Asden was either uncaring or oblivious. "You cut the council seats clean in half today! I think one half of the room despises you and the other half loves you. I'm on the loving half. But don't take that the wrong way, you're not my type! Ha!"

"That's good to know." The Fallen cringed.

"Truthfully, I admired how you stuck up for the female as such against the likes of _Condor._" Asden said his name was distaste, but was still smiling. He probably rarely had any other expression painted on all those fat rolls. He was like a draconic Santa Claus. Freakishly obese to the point of diabetes and happier than a mouse in a cheese wheel. "He's always the head of the more radical division of the seats. Most of us don't like him, and a few of us despise him. Politics don't leave a whole lot of room for personal perfection, but for god's sake, it isn't necessary to be such an ass, pardon my tongue. What about you? And be honest with me."

"I think he's a fucking asshole."

"_HA! _You're a riot! I have an extra sense for funny people. I knew I was right on the coin when I heard your little mother's-leg comment. Crass humor, sir, but well appreciated and deserved!" Asden bellowed, nearly scaring a passing Mole out of his armor. They reached the end of the chamber, and Asden paused before an intersection with four different halls leading off. "Anyway, think of my finding you today as a new fan passing along his best wishes. I can't say I've witnessed even a quarter of the things you described, but if you showed up with _the_ Purple Dragon, I'm inclined to believe it. Most of it, anyway."

"Yeah." His heart felt heavy at the mention.

"Tell me, Fallen, what's your business in the castle? It's quite a large place here, and easy for newcomers to get lost. Maybe I could be a bit of a, oh…" Asden smiled widely. "_-directory._"

"I'm going to the medical wing."

"How'd you figure?" Asden poked one of his dressings and broke out in laughter. "Don't pick a _bone_ with me, I'm just being _humerus!_"

_Shoot me._

"Very funny." The Fallen grinned. "So, can you tell me where it is?"

"Up the western stairs, down one bend, through a pair of red doors on the right." Asden angled his fat chin. "You're visiting that injured soldier, right? Uhmm… Morn, Mournful, what was her name?"

"Morinth. And yes."

"Very good. Well, we'll have to have another of these jolly good chats." Asden held out a paw, and nearly crushed the Fallen's smaller hand when he grabbed and yanked it up and down. "By the way, despite my jocular attitude, I'm a veteran! And this city is my pride and joy! I welcome you with open wings! But just be aware, that the moment you endanger my people, well, I'll rip your arms off! Ha-ha! Ta-ta now."

The Fallen was left shellshocked as the fat councilor waddled off, his booming voice echoing joyously as he encountered someone else he recognized down a hall.

That had been sudden.

_Gotta' respect the guy for prioritizing._

He shrugged, and followed Asden's directions. The stairs were hell, hobbling the whole way, he almost tripped two or three times. Somehow, the torture felt justified.

"Looks like we've encountered the- _Falling –_action of our tale, eh?"

"Fuck you, Conscience." He flipped Conscience off when his duplicate appeared leaning in a doorway down the hall. "I'm not in the mood."

"When is anyone in the mood to be told when they screwed up?" Conscience chuckled, following closely beside him with a jolly step. The Fallen sneered at his own face, grumbling when the latter smiled and waved like a child. "I always tell you to be more open about the whole promiscuity thing, but you _never_ listen! You didn't listen with the last bunch either. Don't tell me you forgot what Nimbus said to you."

_"Fall down a fjord and die in ice." _–echoed in the back of his mind.

The Fallen sighed deeply, ignoring the concerned glances of a few dragon soldiers as he talked to what they saw as empty air. Conscience still paused to shoot them both a '_Wassup!' _before catching back up with his host.

"Look, it's not all doom and gloom, sir. Really, every time you clean the plate, you leave it open for fresh meat and potatoes!"

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Nothing I say to you will ever make you feel better. I can only help you _cope._ Life doesn't work that way. We can't just make our tics and triggers die." Conscience shook his head, sounding very formal. "But, alas, these latest appointments of ours are always so brief. I miss our prolonged talks."

"I don't, you dick."

"Think about this: the possibilities are all there if you can just find the rest of the containment pods scattered across this realm." Conscience reminded. "They _must_ be on this landmass, Fallen. Where else could they be? Get down to exploring, _with_ Spyra! You'll fix everything in the end. But all of that will be a lot easier with your _gear._"

The Fallen lost his patience, and whipped around.

"What do you want me to do, _shoot her?! _We don't do that unless they're _willing! Did she sound willing to you?!_"

The Mole orderly he'd been screaming at trembled, holding up a little stack of papers to hide his snout behind.

"…I-I didn't shoot anybody." He squeaked.

The Fallen's eyes lost their rage and he stepped back, glancing at all the dragons and Moles staring at him from around the hall. He coughed, uttered a small apology, and went on hobbling.

_Damn it._

_Damn it all to hell._

_This shit can never just work out like I want it to._

_….She'll be back._

_Famous last words._

Dragons in similar attire to what he had seen Taliopia wearing watched him in awe and uncertainty as he traipsed through a more quiet section of the ornate castle. The air smelled sterile, and nothing but hushed conversations whispered out of some rooms.

"Excuse me?" The Fallen grunted as he hobbled over to a yellow-colored drake, another healer. The drake had wide eyes and gawked at the human as he approached. His jaw flapped, but no words came out. The Fallen quirked an eyelid and coughed. "…_Yyeaaahhh, _uhm, Morinth? Soldier brought in from the south?"

The drake's tail tip pointed for him through a nearby doorway, his eyes still glassy and glued to the human's face. The Fallen smiled briefly and hobbled past without another word.

* * *

[🐉]

The cell-like room wasn't too dissimilar to a hospital room from other realms he'd been to. It had a window overlooking Immortal Square outside and between the impossible architecture of the castle's larger, exterior structure.

A cot and a little wooden cart filled with salves and medical supplies gave view of a curvaceous, black dragoness that was sprawled out lazily on the prior, and a white-colored one who was seated on one of the guest stools lined by the cotside. Both turned to look at him as he entered.

_Positivity._

He forced a genuine smile, despite his worse mood.

"Afternoon, ladie-"

An excited squeal deafened him in what could've passed as a sonic attack. He grunted when Taliopia wing-leaped across the room and hugged his chest, burying her face in his neck and nuzzling.

"_Fallen!_" She cried. "_The one who saved my Morri-poo! You came!_"

"Cheeky that, love, I think he's just here to get those nasty bandages off of himself." Morinth chuckled, wincing as she rolled over and preened her wings, her emerald eyes alight with… something as she gazed at him. "My knight in _shhhiinninng arrmorrrr~…._" She sang. "How are you?"

"Forget me, how are _you_ feeling?" The Fallen winced as Taliopia excitedly slid off him, grabbing him around the wrist with her tail as she led him to a stool. He sat with a pained grumble, and Taliopia scrambled for the cart nearby.

"Let me get a few mixtures going! You'll be all better soon, Fallen! Leave it to me!" Taliopia snagged a bottle and started shaking it with a dopey smile. She squeaked when it slipped in her paws and almost shattered on the floor. "-_Oo! _…Sorry, I'm excited, and… and… _yeah._"

"She hasn't stopped lauding you since I woke up, with all these stories." Morinth chortled, settling down in the cot and nudging towards him until she was on the absolute edge. She smiled at him and put her jaw in her palm. "Looks like we both got our asses kicked. Cheeky that."

"Indeed." It hurt when he chuckled. And it felt wrong to enjoy the moment. "So, you?"

"I'm feeling much better than I'd be if you hadn't showed up. Most of what happened is a pretty big and nasty blur." Morinth hummed, watching Taliopia mix some vials together on the cart, glass clinking in the din of the room. "…We really did fight the Dark One herself, didn't we?"

"More or less."

"_Pah! _And people used to think back at school that I was a spy for her or something. Nobody stabby-wabs their own employees, at least no one reputable." Her mood sobered a little, and the half-Night dragon shielded an expression of unconformity. "…Was it really as bad as they were saying it was? A lot of blood, and… _things_ hanging out and-"

Glass clinked loudly, and the cart squeaked. Both of them looked over and saw Taliopia bowing her head as she struggled to hold in a developing sob.

"-_Morri'…_" –She choked.

Morinth scooted with a few agonized whines to the end of the cot and opened her wings and arms. The healer cried quietly and buried herself in Morinth's breast, sniffling as she pet her and whispered encouragements.

"Your Morri-poo is fine, Tali', my doctoring 'ness." Morinth hummed, kissing her. She looked over Tali's wing at the Fallen. "That was the last of your magical healing salves, wasn't it?"

"Yes." He nodded. "You needed it more than I did."

"You just step back into my little sphere and immediately go for charming, eh?" Morinth hummed, her tail reaching over and brushing against his ankles. "I owe you my life."

"You owe me nothing. When did the healers say you could leave?"

"Probably by tonight. The real problem was that I had lost a lot of blood and the salve you used hadn't completely worked out some significant head-trauma… luckily my _doctorrrinnnggg 'nesssss _was here to save me."

"N-No no, I didn't do the saving…" Taliopia sniffled, blushing as she looked at the Fallen. "I j-just tidied-up."

"Everyone at the dragonfly village was okay when we left? How about on the flight back home? I can't remember much, like I said…"

He regaled her with everything that had happened since her injury. The attack that had messed up his face, the journey over the sea, the introduction to the academy...

"Spyra was actually here before you." Morinth was chewing a pear-wedge from the cart as she talked with him.

"Oh." He blinked, nibbling on a strip of taffy. He wasn't really hungry. "…H-How was she? And when?"

"Don't you know? You're apparently sharing a room." She hummed. "Oh, I'm teasing. She was her usual peppy self. Though, the _language_ on that 'ness' mouth, _tch! _She could singe off a virgin's earholes."

"Bad words are no good…" Taliopia mumbled as she rubbed an ointment down the Fallen's exposed thigh. His jumpsuit was peeled back in several places and mounds of discarded dressings were piled by the foot of his stool. "…You have n-nice physique, Fallen, and I mean it! I see a lot of people when I'm helping them heal, and-"

Taliopia shut herself up, turning rosier on her face than her own wings.

"_Oh! _Look, I missed a spot!" She jammed her ointment-covered palm into the small of his back, making him grunt with a tiny '_Ow' –_crawling out of his lips. Morinth laughed.

Truly, it was a mood-raiser to see her so upbeat and well after the horror of what had happened. Morinth was as beaming and chipper as usual, snarkily exchanging play-names with Taliopia as the medic rubbed salves and poured potions on him. They talked for what felt like hours. He realized that throughout this whole adventure, he'd seldom had a moment to sit down and truly engage in prolonged conversation with either of them.

Morinth had had such a hard life, and yet here she was, recovering from literally being _disemboweled_, happily munching on pear slices from the little cart's food plate and kicking in hysterics when the Fallen told a joke.

Taliopia was much the same but in different ways. Morinth was more energetic where she was gentle. Her touch was like the kiss of a cloud. He could see why all of her patients had such higher opinions of her work. Taliopia was living her purpose as a healer. As she became more comfortable around him, he sometimes forgot she was working on him when he got lost in the conversation.

"The day was saved and I'm still here for my Tali'. I'd say it's all up-and-up and jolly good from here." Morinth laid back on the cot, sighing happily at him. "…Really, Fallen, you should be charging for these sorts of things. How story-book like! Being saved by an alien that fell from the sky, one might not believe it."

"Believe it. I didn't come this far to not see you all through with me, even your annoyingly brash commanding officer, Captain Hotplate." She laughed again, her wings flapping on the cot. Even Taliopia was muffling a giggle as she worked. "And besides: getting to your see your pretty faces is payment enough."

The Fallen sucked up his own lips.

Son of a bitch, not even a few hours after he'd just destroyed Spyra?

Was his addiction to draconic vagina so bad that his mouth would quip without him even realizing it? He knew the answer already, but to have it so palpably in his face…

"…Anyway, sorry, that was a bit much. Actually, about when Spyra showed up earlier, I…"

He realized that Morinth was no longer laughing. He looked up.

Morinth's snout was flushed to the point where she was almost colored like Taliopia's wing membranes. The dark dragoness said nothing, pawing at her nose and gazing at him over her claws with those brilliant emerald eyes.

He noticed Taliopia too had stopped dripping the vial salve she was holding on an arm-bruise, and had gone very silent behind him.

"…Uhm…" He uttered, glancing between them nervously. "…_So… _any good eateries in the city I should know about?"

Morinth made him jump when a silly cackle snuck out of her snout. The dragon looked timid, like she was sticking a taloned toe into a pool of water to test the temperature.

Speaking of toes…

He flinched when a warm set of dragon foot-pads spread over his knee. Morinth craned her leg over, pressing into him with an experimental angling of her head.

"…_Soooooo~…_" She sang, biting her thumb as she rocked the Fallen's leg on his heel. Back and forth, slowly. He gulped. "…All that cheap flattery was quite legitimate I see."

She glanced at Taliopia, nudging towards him with her eyes when she paused.

'_It's okay!' –_she mouthed.

The Fallen startled again when Taliopia's warm paws slid up his back and settled on his shoulders, her breath washing over the back of his neck.

"I didn't get hit back there." He specified like a moron.

"…_Y-You smell real nice…_" The medic nervously squeaked, taking another sniff as she doted on his skin. "…Really flowery soap… flowers are my favorite…"

"I could name a type of flower that's _my _favorite." He mumbled. He mentally slapped himself.

_God damn it, brain! You animal._

…But that sweet smell of pheromones.

This wasn't exactly a big room. _Two_ dragonesses? At the same time? Pluming forth such affectionate wafts of carnal intent?

Oh god.

"U-Uhm… i-if Tali' could finish up with the healing salves, I-I'll just be on my way…" The Fallen tried to stand up. He gasped when _Taliopia_ of all dragons, planted her paws on his shoulders and actually shoved him back on his tush.

The medic _growled._

When did Taliopia ever growl?

"…Before yesterday, me and Taliopia had been discussing some… _things._" Morinth said huskily, her other foot coming out and running down his shin. "…There's a lot that we've not quite sampled in our lives, as you can imagine. We've always kept to ourselves, in our own niche. If I hadn't ended up here, I think things would've been different earlier, but better late than never."

Taliopia's tail whipped out, and the door to the little room slammed shut. Morinth took her feet off him and slid down and onto the floor.

Oh god.

"How you went through all that trouble to help us isn't the only story Taliopia's told me about you." Morinth explained, her claws clicking on the stone floor as she trotted up to him, propping her forepaws on his knees and lifting herself to face-level. The Fallen stared back in silent awe. "…Something about _you,_ whether it's…" She took his chin in her paw, moving his head about and examining it gently. "…you alien looks, or your scent, or _touch. _It just has us thinking, quite a bit."

"Me and Morinth won't tell anyone what I saw." Taliopia hummed, him feeling the warm, wet glance of her tongue sampling his neck. "…W-We were hoping-"

"-_wanting._" Morinth sang in correction, her tail coiling over his leg as the two dragonesses felt him up and groped him.

"-you t-to not tell anyone either…" The medic blushed, pressing the soft scales of her breast into his exposed back, a deep-seated rumble gathering inside her.

"Tell anyone what?" He asked, already knowing the answer.

"If we knew just why Spyra is so _caa-rraazzzeeyyy about youuuu~._"

"H-How would you k-know _that?_" He began to twitch.

_Dragoness pheromones._

_Oh god._

He was quaking in his seat. Soft pawpads glancing over his skin, rotund, feminine dragon-chests pressing into his back and breast, thick and prehensile tails coiling over his legs…

…And holy hell, since when had Morinth's thighs looked so _full?_ She hadn't always been like that, right?

"_You'll see~._" Morinth giggled, her tongue flicking over his lips. The Fallen froze. "…_But first, we have to get that alien jump-suity thing off you~._"

"M-Morinth…" Taliopia gasped, her paw wandering down the Fallen's arm. "…I-I can't-"

"So _don't._" Morinth winked.

_Wat_

The Fallen felt his wrist jerked back against his own volition. Before he knew what was happening, there was a wet squelch, and a distinct, moist warmth overcoming his fingers up to the knuckle.

He peered back at Taliopia, heard her moan, and saw what she was doing.

The barrier broke.

The stool tumbled away, Morinth yipped in surprise and Taliopia squealed.

The first thing to go airborne was the Fallen's jumpsuit, before both dragonesses were besieged by a naked man, leaping at them ferally from his place like an overeager puma, fire in his eyes and vigor in his crotch.

_I can't even visit a hospital without flipping the 'tang switch on._

* * *

[🐉]

* * *

_**{Ace Combat 7 OST: Transfer Orders}**_

* * *

From this height, the fires almost looked manageable. Guardian Cyrila knew better, however. Oversight was burning in a way that only the engines of war could cause. Even if she and her kin were able to save Lilith's kingdom, she doubted much of the city could be recovered in the aftermath. The Dark Army had already secured a victory in assuring that the city would never recover.

Black pylons crawled up towards the sky in the distance, obscuring entire streets within Oversight's walls. The lick of fire was invisible at least, but its black breath made the heavens inky and tainted what were normally white clouds.

"They're almost past the first ridgeline, ma'am." Colcrus called from his gargoyle-like perch a few feet away. The white and bright blue Ice Dragon had his tail whipping excitedly as he angled his horned nose down and gazed hungrily at the masses of infantry far below. "I can see them! Elements of Urukal's unit, armored Orcs flanked by lesser detachments. I can already see snow black with their blood."

Cyrila refrained from reminding him to be patient. Dragons never learned to stop grabbing bees until one stung them.

"Rocks set!" Blizzren cried over the howl of the mountain winds. He and three other soldiers glanced and straddled among an organized rack of ice-wreathed boulders sealed in by conjured lips of glistening ice ridging before them like a steep ramp. The whole setup and its operators teetered dizzyingly off the very edge of the cliff face, threatening to tumble to the thousands of feet's worth of sharp-rocks below. "Waiting for your order."

"Excellent." Cyrila said blandly, edging a brow down at the festering masses between the great snow-capped peaks sealing Solemn Pass below. There had to be over a thousand of them. Detachment units advancing prematurely around the siege.

Terradora's forces would keep them from advancing down the eastern coast, but so far, it was up to Cyrila and her men to carry out a stubborn defense in the snowy mountains barring Oversight from the north. If the Dark Army got through, they would have a clear path through lower Avalar and potentially into the heartland of the Dragon Realms.

_I think I prefer to deal with the snot-snouted and uncivilized youths over this,_ Cyrila mentally grumbled, crinkling her nose when she glanced at her forepaw and noticed all the ice rime and mud on her talons. She'd been deployed for days, and the whole '_Living in the Wilderness' _deal wasn't sitting well with her own higher standard.

She _was_ the Guardian of Ice after all. She was above this nonsense.

"_It's for the morale._" –She remembered her sister, Ignitia, saying to her. "_Dragons are always inspired when their leaders are at the forefront, _soaking up the glory? _And arrowheading the charge? Actually, I couldn't think of a better place for you to be! It's perfect. It feeds to your… tastes, and acts as an advantage for us in the field. Please, Cyrila, think about the state of others before you decide._"

She had said so much of that like it was supposed to be enticing.

Cyrila enjoyed it when people recognized her brilliance, but at the same time, being brilliant was a nirvana she wanted _without_ becoming a martyr on top of it. Glory meant nothing if all the benefits stood in the wake of your corpse.

And besides, dying in the middle of nowhere was so… _ungratifying. _Though, at least her body would be beautiful as an icicle, just like her uncle's body was back in the Crystal Tombs of Chrysalis.

"The Ancestors have abandoned us. Look at this! The fires are spreading and cannot be stopped." Colcrus hopped between a few crags and landed beside her in the snow, gesturing to the view of Oversight with a white wing. When Cyrila didn't feed into his statements, the lithely built drake craned an eye- the one with the big claw-scar running across the brow –at her. "Maybe it's because they knew this was all avoidable."

"Or they're tired of the same old shit." Cyrila huffed. "You're wasting time, Colcrus. Oversight has burned before and it will burn again. We can at least stop the killing _here,_ with a singular blow. It just has to be done right."

"It's a good thing they chose us then. The Fires couldn't do it, not with finesse." He grinned, eyes darting around the mountains. "Does overkill count?"

"Only if you want it to." Cyrila backed away from the cliff and crunched through the snow. "Do find me the messenger wingman, I wish to know what my _sister_ is doing. Hopefully not creating another mess for me to clean up."

"Which one?" Colcrus followed after her. "_Oh,_ you mean Volteera. I don't know, ma'am, you don't seem too concerned."

"Mm. Funny."

"I'm not missing the tumble, am I?"

"To be honest: _yes,_ very likely."

"Then why can't we get Blizz' to do it?" He queried. "He's supposed to be the rearline, not any of the other guys."

"How many bundles of cold joy do we have waiting for our ugly friends down there exactly?" Cyrila bemusedly grinned.

"Fifteen. Why?"

"Do you really think you'll miss all fifteen if you start flying _now?_"

"Permission to speak freely?" He winced.

"Queens and Kings! With the leverage I've given you? Would you stop being a disorderly hatchling and get the hell over there already?"

"Yes ma'am." Colcrus dejectedly grumbled. His wings kicked and he flew off around one of the mountain peaks. Cyrila didn't spare the rhino-horned drake another look as she skirted the cliff's ribs towards the first rack.

She spread her purple wings and flew over a ridge to half her distance. Blizzren, a pale silver-scaled Ice drake, clambered down one of the boulders and used an ice-lip as a sled to land in front of her.

"Everything is in order." His rumbling voice etched through the blizzard's howl. He had a pair of piercing yellow eyes to contrast the near-white silver making his hide. They looked like little fireballs, peering at her through the snowy haze. "Where did you send Colcrus, ma'am? Is he not needed?"

"It's just a checkup." Cyrila chirped. "If I'm not holding Volteera's claw through the maze, _no one _will, especially Terradora and Lilith. The latter might even try burying her to feed those damned rose-bushes she adores so much."

"I've never seen a noble that obsessed with botany before." Blizzren gave a rare moment of personable musing. He was normally very stoic to the point of being more stone than the mountains his family called home. "Where I come from, the only green we ever saw were blue mountain flowers that grew in fissures and cracks. They only bloomed for three months every year. There were dragons who had grown old there and had never seen one."

"Illusive flowers?" Cyrila was only paying attention partially. Her gaze was fixated on several pre-planned spots lining the peaks. There was a rack _there,_ another _there,_ and another over there. Each of her Ice Dragon teams had a horn-bearer that would sound a note if something went wrong or the enemy was made aware too early. So far, the only things she could hear was the whisper of the cold wind and Blizzren's deep, raspy breathing. She snorted and glanced at him. "You're wheezing again, lieutenant."

"It's the altitude." Blizzren shrugged, flexing his wings and muscular neck. "It's not kind on my bones. It _probably_ won't be trouble…"

"You're not a funny drake."

"Not in a commonplace way, ma'am, no." He chortled, calming and suddenly becoming much more hushed as he talked. "…Ma'am, what do you make of the messengers coming from Warfang? The Purple Dragon? And a warrior said to have dismantled an entire tribe of Apes?"

"Focus on _your_ story right now, so you don't die." Cyrila paused. "But I believe the purple part, if you must know. Guardian Ignitia's closer to that than either of us. I expect when we win today, gloriously, we'll have an opportunity to fly back to the capital and seek truths in person."

"But if the Purple Dragon has come, doesn't that mean we've already won?"

Cyrila chuckled sourly.

"Oh, Blizzren, your great grandfathers said the same thing when Malefora walked through Immortal Square, and so too did mine when the fools tried to build Kar Tuum, on an airless rock-shelf." She said. "Now get on top of that rack and wait for my signal. And tell your secondary Wing to prepare for an assault. They're not going to appreciate us holding these ridges once we start dropping rocks on their heads."

"It is done." Blizzren flew off.

"_Clear those!_" Cyrila barked, angled her jaw for the ice-lip holding the rack in place. The squadmates atop the boulders scrambled to higher ledges and snowbanks. Cyrila waited for the last dragon to clear themselves before she opened her maw.

The cold, mountain air whistled sharply as a white ball of energy began to develop and swirl in the back of her throat, illuminating the interior of her mouth white and casting her own shape in shadowed contrast on the surrounding snow.

Down in the center of Solemn Pass, the narrow vein of snowy rocklands making the path was shifting with hundreds of hobbling monstrosities moving east. Lumbering Orcs bedecked in cold-rimed plate, wielding greatweapons were flanked by clambering bushels of tiny Grublins. A handful of towering, ten-foot-tall Trolls walked on all fours in the centers of the thicket rabble, filthy maws hanging ajar and drooling green slime into the snow.

_Beasts._

Cyrila hadn't lived a day in her life without this army of pests being in the background, polluting everything. Her disdain for Orcs and Grublins was renowned, and her habit for freezing their bodies solid and smashing them into little glittering pebbles had earned her the moniker of '_Snowman Breaker' _–in way too many frontal units. Her heart was probably the coldest in the realms, and even _she_ was made sick by their odious presence.

Her tail whipped its purple-tipped blade and the ball of cold in her mouth reached a crescendo in size and glow. The moment the first domino fell, the other units had orders to follow suit. This all depended on her go-ahead, and she didn't plan on disappointing.

The ball of energy produced a seismic **_Crack~! _**–that quivered the very air and dislodged snow from some rime ridges nearby. The ice-lip keeping the rack sealed began to whittle away and turn into runoff water down the cliff face.

"Give the signal." Cyrila heaved, cutting off the magic and waving her forepaw. Across the surrounding peaks, fourteen other little white lights appeared in the far distance as the other teams began to melt their ice-gates too. "Once the pass is blocked, all of you will follow me on the first dive. We're _freezing_ targets, Blizzren's Wing is on smashing duty. We work in shifts until this entire phalanx are a bunch of ice-chips for thirsty snow-hares to lap up."

The droning call of a warhorn eerily warbled out over the wind and peaks. Cyrila turned around and tried to pinpoint which of the teams had given the signal. Down below, the Orcs were trundling to a stop, beady little red eyes raised and darting around the mountains.

She wondered for a second if they actually were _surprised._

Trying to use Solemn Pass to go around Oversight.

Did they think an ambush _wasn't_ planned?

"_There!_" One of her soldiers called, pointing a talon at the gray sky. "_Those aren't dragons!_"

No, indeed they weren't. The Guardian growled when she picked out a cluster of worm-thin shapes zipping out of the masses of Dark ground soldiers and punching through the cold air upwards. They undulated like serpents and caught the mountain breeze under crimson, ragged flaps adorning their narrow ribs in flares. A whole group of them were zeroing in on one of her team rack positions.

_Wyverns._

Cyrila opened her mouth to start bellowing orders, but then Ignitia's words echoed in her mind.

_Morale._

She clenched her fangs and huffed, winking a snowflake from her eye.

"We knew they'd try that, it's just sooner than anticipated. Scramble a repellent team!"

She couldn't count how many Wyverns there were, the distance was too great, and the weather too poor for even her draconic eyesight to pluck out for her. The wind kicked and five soldiers whisked off the cliff face and dove to meet the enemy formation with their tails trailing loosely behind them. They brandished their teeth, cold breaths and a variety of claw and tail tip-mounted blades. Cyrila spread her wings on instinct, wishing to join them.

But she couldn't.

She had to protect the racks on this side of the pass.

Another horn drawled into the air, and then another. The rumble of thunder echoed across the pass and the first ice-lips melted, sending their payloads tumbling in disorganized bands down the sides of the cliffs.

Cyrila bore her teeth as the first boulders bounced like rubber balls down the peaks and impacted with devastating effect into the flanks and heart of the battalions centering the pass. Each rock created a coning blast of snow-dust and dirt. Bodies looked like tiny specks flying tens of feet. Formations of Orc infantry knocked off their own heels looked like minuscule rows of silvery dominoes toppling in a successive, freakishly beautiful metallic wave.

**_Bmmm~! _**–each boulder would rumble out when it hit the earth. The sky was gray enough that someone far away could easily confuse it with actual thunder.

Cyrila's ice-ridge was the next to go. She consciously wandered to the side as the colossal stones rolled and broke off. More booms of impact and the far off screams of dying beasts.

"_They're right on top of us!_" –Someone on the upper ridge cried.

There was an ear-piercing shriek that penetrated the blizzard gusts effortlessly, and it was right over Cyrila's head.

The Ice Guardian was already springing into motion by the time she brought her maw up to counter the attack, but it was too late.

A crimson, reptilian horror zipped out of the gray and slammed into her breast like a cannonball. The blow sent them both tumbling through the snow, ending with Cyrila shoved into a drift, one eye blinded with slush and her wings painfully bent underneath her curvaceous frame.

The Wyvern straddling her belly blinked a pair mismatched-size red eyes at her and shrieked like a bat, its ugly, goblinoid face peeling open to reveal a hideously toothed maw running green with morose spittle.

Cyrila shrieked back at it, her draconic scream drowning under the cold blast of deathly wind. A cone of white exploded from her mouth and washed over the Wyvern as she kicked it in the gut and vaulted it off her.

The Wyvern's howls of pain were silenced as her powerful Mana-magicks laced through its body and froze its blood solid. Mid-air, the monster crunched and crinkled, falling back down to earth in an eternally stuck position of recoil and totally encrusted in a conjured blanket of translucent ice.

Cyrila jumped to her paws and bit into the monster's frozen tail, bringing the Wyvernsicle in a wide, swinging arc and crashing it into the face of another of its kin diving at her flank. The body shattered like glass and sent the attacker flipping off the side of the cliff, shards of ice trailing gore from where they impaled its face and throat like shrapnel.

"_Hold them!_" She barked, spitting her victim's tail tip from her mouth as she landed in the snow.

The other soldiers in the Wing engaged with ferocity the crimson mockeries of cousins the Wyverns were to them. A dragon jumped off a drift rise and collided with one of the beasts breast-first, the two of them buckled into a clawing, snarling and spitting ball as they flew off the mountainside and towards the pass valley below.

A Wyvern was bathed in frost-breath from a drake passing directly overhead. It froze solid and careened the rest of its intended path before slamming into a cliff face and exploding like some kind of icy bomb.

Cyrila was always of the belief of her own end of the eternal bigotry between her kind, the Ices and the Fire Dragons.

_Ice_ was mightiest. Even over flame. Watching frozen Wyvern corpses break into clouds of debris like cheap pottery against bricks was a glorious thing to witness as proof.

More boulders slipped from their racks as the rest of her teams did their jobs before taking off to engage the flights of Wyverns. In the pass below, the staccato rumbles of deep quakes and the shrill screams of wounded and dying were evident.

One always had to hope enough of the plan would work when the time came for the situation to be manageable. So far, luck was smiling on them.

_Mostly, anyway._

Cyrila brought a Wyvern into the side of a drift and pinned it with her forepaws. It shrieked and writhed, tearing at her with its teeth and little barbed claws on the tips of its wingflares. She snapped her jaws forward like a striking snake and caught it around the throat. She bit down and sawed her teeth into the scaly flesh like she was trying to grind down a loaf of bread into two halves.

The Wyvern screamed until blood clotted its mouth and she dug deep enough to hit vertebrae. Cyrila felt a crunch before she tore back and upwards, sending the severed head and upper neck flipping away, projected on a spewing fountain of gore.

Her dragons were holding a decent line, even if it was wide and invisible. She spotted one or two casualties for every batch of Wyverns that died, however.

Such was the nature of the Dark Army's soldiers. Their advantage came from numbers, not quality. Each Wyvern was designed to die in groups of ten for every dragon its assigned mob killed.

A piercing scream louder than anything either side could muster echoed out from above in a shrill dive. Cyrila rolled off the body beneath her, grinding her fangs as the terrible noise hurt her hearing-holes. It felt like someone was driving a knife into her head.

She looked up and gawked as blood and snow dripped from her face.

"_Long time no-see, Cyrila~! Let me embrace you~!_"

-Then, Cynder collided with her in a deft swoop.

The Ice Guardian had the wind knocked out of her with a steamed- _'Oof-!' _-. She craned limply over Cynder's black shoulder as the Cloudripper lowered her arc and torpedoed for the face of a mountain ridge.

Cyrila was helpless as she tried to twist in the powerful black dragon's grip, to bring her tailblade around and aim for Cynder's belly.

**_Bmmmmmkk~!_**

-Her back and wings bore the brunt of the impact as Cynder smashed her bodily into a spanning face of icy rock.

"Apologies for my tardiness." Cynder breathed cheekily, riding Cyrila down the tumbling roll of debris and ice like she was a sled. "I had to make some reserved plans before I went out today. I hope I haven't missed much…"

Cyrila snarled as they hit the end of the slide. Her wings lashed and a blast of cold breath shot into Cynder's face, blinding her as she roared. The Guardian gripped her just above the choker brace and crashed her other claw in a fist across Cynder's jaw, knocking her back in a painfully angled arc.

Her icy tail snared Cynder's neck and yanked the black dragoness off to send her rolling through a loose drift in the snow.

Cyrila righted herself and hunched over, spitting a wad of congealing blood into the puffy white as she snarled.

"_Cynder!_"

"You still haven't lost that hook." Cynder wriggled her mandible as she stood. "But, you certainly haven't gained as much weight as Ignitia has. Ice Dragons really do skirt their diets as the stories regale."

"Shut up, Cynder. We've already won." Cyrila nodded briefly to the valley behind her. "Solemn Pass is sealed and Urukal's army is crushed."

"I don't give a fuck about Urukal or his miscreant henchmen." Cynder laughed pleasantly. "I'm here because I want _you,_ you silly little Guardian…"

"Come and get me then."

Black Shadow fire washed over Cyrila in a singeing, moaning tornado from Cynder's maw. The cone of onyx flames broke when a ball of solid ice catapulted through the haze and shattered in Cynder's face. Cyrila pounced from what was the interior of the sphere and tackled her into the snow.

Cynder roared as her enemy bit deeply into her neck, trails of blood running down from Cyrila's fangs as she ground her jaw. Cynder's tailblade glinted and curved between their bellies, lashing west and east and opening both of Cyrila's knees with spatters of gore. The Ice Guardian unclamped from her neck in a pained scream, her own blood and Cyrila's spit flecking in Cynder's face.

"_I should've done this years ago._" Cynder lapped up blood on her chops and brought her wing-blades around. "_It took a man from a meteor to wake me up._"

Cyrila howled as the twin blades hooked the joints of where her wings met her scapulas. Cynder heaved and smashed the Guardian into the snow below her.

"_Let me see that pretty face of yours, Cyrila, I've been meaning to fix it for you._"

Cynder's claws clapped over her bleeding shoulders and yanked the Guardian up. She brought Cyrila around and chucked her face-first into a cliff sprawl.

**_Crunch~! _**–Cyrila's cheekbone snapped and she became blinded in one eye as blood ran like a river from a gash in her brow. She collapsed into the rocks and snow in a heap. Cynder darted over and was on top of her again in a second. The Cloudripper gripped a horn and tugged her victim back onto her hinds, earning a pained shriek from Cyrila that rebounded across the peaks.

"_I know it doesn't even stink like it: but believe me, I'm not here for your pleasant company. I'm not even here to fight you._" Cynder grinned manically as she played with Cyrila's teetering form like it was a giant, poseable ragdoll.

_Martyrdom._

_Morale._

Cyrila wished she wasn't about to die just so she could make it back to the academy and slap Ignitia in the face.

"_But don't get me wrong, putting you in your place has been, and always will be a _dream,_ you cunt._"

Cynder bellowed at the top of her lungs and headbutted her between the eyes. Scales cracked and scarlet rivulets of liquid trailed through the air like tossed serpents. Cyrila flipped once, twice, and then landed on a lower snow-plateau with a thunderous crash.

For her, the world turned dark.

For her attacker, things were just a bit brighter.

"_Lady Cyrila!_"

Cynder growled, peering through the blood running past her eyes at a pale-colored Ice Dragon with a rhinoceros-like horn protruding from the tip of his snout. He bounded elegantly over a few rifts and leapt at her to keep her away from Cyrila's prone form.

_Touching._

She preened on her hinds and let Colcrus land in the snow in front of her. She batted him across the face with a painful slash, cracked a rib with a knuckled blow to the torso, and sent him careening away from her with a swat of her wing. Colcrus sailed into a hill and vanished in a plume of dust.

_It doesn't even take effort sometimes._

"This place is too noisy for what I need you to do." Cynder lamented, landing beside Cyrila's crumpled form. She bit her on the scruff of her finned neck and dragged the defeated Guardian out of the snow. "_Come wshh me. We hash wovk th doo._"

With immense effort, Cynder flapped her wings until she slowly peeled Cyrila from the mountainside and began to fly off with her, dangling and bobbing in the wind like a corpse.

Just the faintest hint of breath and the ability to sense her heartbeat told Cynder she was still alive.

And that was perfect.

She ignored a cluster of Wyverns as they flew past and into the developing blizzard obscuring the aerial battle from her sight. A few dragons witnessed their leader being carried away, but stubborn Wyvern attackers prevented them from making ground fast enough to intercept her kidnapper.

By the time the Warfangian forces withdrew, Cynder and Cyrila were long gone.

* * *

[🐉]


	29. Chapter 28 - Trouble Troubles

**Dragon(s)layer**

**28**

* * *

**Trouble Troubles**

* * *

Reclaiming classrooms was Ignitia's campaign. Since there were no fill-ins, apparently the Ices and the Fires had spent a good deal of time chopping up fiefdoms from one another across the lecture halls. Reuniting the greater student body was a task met with much yelling, wing waving and orderly dishing out of petty punishments.

"They started it." An indignant Fire drake cried.

"The first bottle to fly came from _your_ end of the room. You blind or something?" The Ice drake on Ignitia's other side snapped.

"I don't care very much about which one of you started it, but I _do_ care about footing the damages bill to your families." The Guardian growled, giving her best '_Pissed off mama-hen' _–look to both groups of younglings. "I'm curious to hear what they would think about their sons and daughters weaponizing an entire alchemical classroom. Do any of you see that volumetric flask? The one in pieces on the floor there? That costs more than a year's quarter enrollment."

"…Uhm… w-which one's the… the whatchyamacallit?" Somebody peeped. Ignitia groaned in despair.

"Bottom line, gentledrakes and hens: prepare for a scolding back home. Respect academy property. And for god's sake, stop sleeping on your desks and _pay attention!_"

_That_ wasn't even the fullest extent of it.

Every time she popped into a room, someone was sleeping, someone else was hanging from the ceiling, and in one special case, she discovered a week old sandwich left to rot under a desk. A drawer was left open, revealing a poorly hidden raunchy erotica novelette that had seen obvious usage, judging by the way the pages were stuck together.

There was even a dead bird that someone had swept behind a storage cabinet and had forgotten. Ignitia was terrified that there would be another body and it would've been one of the students, or worse, one of the fill-ins that had supposedly fled.

Thankfully, nothing of note was that extreme. But after a few hours, she was exhausted. It felt like the flight from the south had repeated itself.

"Ma'am, where should I leave the exams?" One of the lodging staff pestered her.

"_Desk._" –Was all Ignitia could mutter.

She summarily face-planted into the plush futon running her office's northern wall, and deflated into its cushions with a deep sigh. The other dragon looked on in pity before leaving the stack of papers and closing the door behind him. Ignitia attempted to word out a- '_thankyou' _–but all that came through her teeth was a corpse's wheeze.

What a day.

She couldn't remember wanting sleep so badly before. The nap had done nothing.

She snorted as she lounged in the cushions, ignoring the rapturous red details of her office around her. She'd put a lot of time and effort into making her secondary abode in the main hall decorative, a source to derive contemplation and accomplishment from.

Now, it was just a nice cell to lock out the world from and linger.

Ignitia's wings wilted over her back and her eyes were almost impossible to keep open. She snorted again when the scent of perspiration slapped her in the face. She was anathema to admit that it was coming from _herself._

Even her perfumes were powerless against that.

_Cinnamon._

She _loved_ the smell of cinnamon. Evidently, so did the Fallen.

Ignitia's claw twitched towards her large desk in the western corner. There was a drawer that she kept one of her bottles in. She wanted to smell nice for when he came back, because… because…

**_BM-BM_**

"…Come in." Ignitia groaned, rolling off the futon as the door clicked open and shut.

"Good afternoon, Ignitia." Cyrila gave her usual cold and brief grin before strutting into the room. "Taking another midday nap for the next course?"

"Good afternoon, and no, I was just closing my eyes for a moment. _Ah,_ here, sit." The Fire Guardian yawned and rubbed at an eye as she stumbled away from the futon and towards her desk. "So tell me how it went."

"I could say _sluggish. _Mother keeps seeing things in the dark. She's convinced that there's a goblin living in the cupboard and I don't even know what to say to her anymore. You can't tell them they are wrong, because they'll just forget two minutes later. I'm astounded she remembered my name, let alone my face." Cyrila blabbered, hopping onto the cushions and lounging like a cat as Ignitia slipped into a large roundel throne behind her desk. "If you want to hear something morose: I always expected her to fade away in her nesting, still and regal, just like father and uncle."

"I'm so sorry, Cyrila, I'm-" Ignitia sighed sadly, pausing and folding her claws on the desk. "-_Ah,_ I'm sorry, I don't know what else to say."

"Stop apologizing for one: it's unbecoming when you've done nothing wrong." Cyrila waved a paw. "No dragon handles the departure of those dear to them well, and they never know what to say when other dragons suffer it beside them. Your time is remedy enough."

"Certainly, and as long as you need."

"…Do you still have the bottle?"

"Of course I do." Ignitia chuckled, slipping open a drawer and pulling out a quietly sloshing pillar of blood hued glass. "_Crimsonscale_, aged. _Nono,_ sit. You've been on your paws all day."

"Hardly the worst thing to drink about." Cyrila huffed, toying with her own tail blade in her claw. "Do you know that she was attentive for a whole _half_ of the visit? I know the healers say that there aren't triggers for these sorts of things, but graces of the Old Masters, the way she looked at me when I mentioned father's manuscripts. I think she blanked out every word I said about them on purpose. I didn't even think that was possible anymore."

"Engineering failures must hit the Ice Dragons harder than most." Ignitia teased, pouring two glasses of the blood red wine and rounding her desk.

"No no, it isn't _that._" Cyrila shook her head, taking her glass when Ignitia's tail stretched out and uncurled from the neck for her. "It's not even that blasted manifesto he scribbled up. My father was drunk for half his career successes, but the most mysterious of his works were always done sober. He had to be, just to stomach some of the flowers he saturated that parchment with, but I like to think he was most intuitive and accepting when he was sober."

"He tried to put his claws on you."

"After _two_ of those." Cyrila pointed at the bottle. "The apology letters started coming in when he was in the mountains. I could tell his state by the tone of his sentences. False and drunk father was very brash and judgmental, sober and true father was very doting, poetic and neutral. You couldn't get colder opposites, or easier signs to determine who was living in his head that day."

"So how did this influence today? Was your mother… asking about him? Looking for him?"

"_MmMm._" Cyrila hummed, being caught mid-sip of her wine. "No, not looking for him. But she is far gone enough that she could be calling his name the next time I delve into the dark over there."

The way Cyrila talked about it so leisurely made Ignitia's stomach turn in loops. She wasn't planning on voicing that lesser opinion, but… Ancestors, how disregardful.

"She _did_ ask about him, if I had seen him, spoken with him, or if I knew what he was doing in the military." Cyrila clicked her tongue. "What was I supposed to say? The truth? I've said it a hundred times, she just forgets, and I don't have time for that badgering antic any longer, with all this work to be done…"

"So what happened?" Ignitia swallowed a displeased comment.

"I told her that father had written me a sonnet." The Ice Guardian splayed a claw, as if presenting some unseen prize beside her snout. "Talk about dodging a bullet."

"Uh-huh." Ignitia found she had drained her glass. She sniffed, and refilled it.

"-'_No, Cyrie', he's not in _those_ mountains, he's in the peaks over Solemn mapping out his sire's schematics. You silly hatchling, you were always so forgetful.'-_" Cyrila mimicked in a squeaky voice. "The gall! As if it was impossible for the old fool to collect his scales long enough and actually write down a coherent sentence. He was a cock, not an illiterate Ape."

"Be patient with her, sister, she's unwell. I'm certain nothing malicious was intended in anything she said. You know how things become blocked and…" Ignitia drowned any further peddling with a heavy sip.

Oh. An empty cup again. Time to pour another…

"…_And as always… I hate it when you're right._" Cyrila mumbled, swirling the last of her wine in the funnel as her tail twitched. "It's been quite difficult to concentrate the last few days."

"…_Really?_" Ignitia shook herself, her head suddenly buzzing as she put down the glass and stayed away from it. "I'm really not joking when I say no one was noticing. You're a hard worker who gets results. Even Terradora appreciates your opinions on matters… less approachable to all others."

"The only dragon she listens to is _you,_ Ignitia. Sometimes your modesty is very grating, merely because it's _patronizing._"

A long second of silence went by.

Cyrila sighed and put down her glass on the floor.

"…I apologize." She uttered. "I came in here to-…. _Tch,_ you know why I came in here. It isn't fair to take it out on you."

"There's nothing to forgive, sister." Ignitia crossed the room, bowing her head close to Cyrila's and placing a paw on her shoulder. "What we are asked to do every day is so hard. There isn't a dragon in the realms seeing that differently. So do not fret, I've thick enough skin to take any collateral in stride. You can even smile while you do it, if it makes you feel better."

Cyrila's dark expression slowly broke for a sweet little laugh. The Ice Guardian nonchalantly brushed Ignitia off herself and adjusted on the futon. Even ungratefully, she hated it when people touched her.

It had been rumored one of the reasons Cyrila had chased Guardianship and the solitude it entailed, was because none of the Ice Dragon males could stand her egomania.

But it was just a rumor, like many things.

Like how some dragons rumored that Ignitia was the only Guardian of the four who was actually personable and approachable…

-_Which was a hot load of crap_, Ignitia thought, corking the bottle.

"Noticeable or not, mother's condition keeps me awake at night, and memories of my uncle continue to give me unrest at all hours. I am so… so _directionless. _I don't know what is right to pursue any longer. And I am tired." Cyrila chuckled. "So _so_ tired…"

**_SLAM~! _**

-The door to the office swung open. Ignitia yipped in fright, spilling her wine glass all across her desk, Cyrila just snapped her eyes shut and experienced a brow twitch.

"_Oh gods._" She could barely be heard whispering.

"Stupendous, outrageous, splendid and _prodigious!_ They _all_ passed!" Volteera cried, her shapely yellow form bouncing like an excited doe into the office. She spread her blue wings wide and beamed at the two of them with amber eyes. "I am so inexorably, fittingly, proudly- _oh,_ and _expectantly _as well –undoubtedly and-"

"_Volteera,_ how lovely of you to join us." Ignitia sharply preened a wing to cut her off, forcing a grin as she snatched up a handkerchief from a drawer and dabbed at the wine spreading on her desk top.

"Yes, _yippee._" Cyrila groaned under her breath. She slipped a glass mask on and grinned with full teeth at Volteera from the futon. "_Sister,_ you must have such good news to be in so… _chipper_ a mood. Not that that is unusual."

"Oh yes, so indeed and suitably chipper, happy, excited and accomplished. Very accomplished indeed." Volteera nodded excitedly back for the still opened office door. "Master Bilou just returned the parchments to me, and I have deduced through many hours of stringent filtering that every single one of my students achieved _acceptability_ during the elemental phase of the course!"

"_Very_ nice!" Ignitia smiled, trudging over and shutting the door with her tail. "That was the final trial setting, yes? All of them are now applicable?"

"The whole, entire, complete class." The Guardian of Electricity held her head high, brandishing her blue breast happily. "And so many prime achievers in the bunch! There is one lovely hen named _Rava,_ and she has proven to possess wonderful, illustrious and defined skill."

"Oh, I know her." Ignitia nodded, keeping it to herself that she only knew who Rava was because of the constant disciplinary punishments she received from harassing other females in the dorms. "We're both quite elated to hear about this. It's much better than my own class results, and… Cyrila? How did your roster fair this year?"

"It was evenly split from the crap and crop." Cyrila examined her own talons with a dismissive grunt, refusing to look at Volteera any longer than she had to. "And after going through all those scrolls and records, the day has left me very tired and in need of quiet. Ignitia was providing consul. _Ahem._"

"_Oh! _How expeditiously and unanimously splendid!" It went right over Volteera's horns. The Electric Dragoness was like an eager hatchling, eyes big and saucer-like, wings raised in interest. "I hope I wasn't being counterproductive and interrupting…"

"_Actually-_" Cyrila started to smile.

"I'll join both of you!"

"…._*sigh*_"

Volteera yanked a cushion without warning from under Cyrila's haunches, making the Ice Dragoness gasp in insult. She set it and herself atop it on the floor, curling her tail around herself with content.

"Do continue with your considerations and discussions, I'll participate when you finish." Volteera chirped, eyes eagerly darting between the two of them.

Ignitia opened her mouth to speak but faltered. Cyrila adjusted to the uneven height on the futon and grumbled, snatching up her glass and draining the rest of it.

"Might I see that?" She asked, pointing at the bottle. When Ignitia slid out of her roundel throne, Cyrila snorted and said: "Just _throw_ it."

Ignitia harrumphed at the snark in her friend's voice, and with a deft lash of her tail, the corked bottle sailed right past Volteera's nose and across the office. Cyrila caught it in her paw with a sharp _clink! _–of her talons and bit the cork off.

**_Thhw-WHMP!_**

She poured a full glass and took a sip.

"Fires hold it better than Ices." Ignitia hummed as she sat back down.

"Leave it." Cyrila waved a paw and drowned her snout in the wine. Volteera watched her, amber eyes darting to the bottle in her claw.

"Marvelous! That's a Crimsonscale Brew if I am not mistaken, which I certainly, definitely and solidly am not. Very refreshing indeed!" Volteera looked at Ignitia. When no one said anything, she slapped her tongue and smiled wider. "_Very_ refreshing."

Cyrila sneered, recoiling like someone had farted in her face. She leaned back into the futon and drained her cup even more.

Volteera's smile experienced a slight, near unnoticeable twitch.

"_Cyrila._" Ignitia sternly snapped.

The Ice Guardian huffed childishly and nudged the bottle across the floor with her foot. Ignitia gave Volteera a glass and the latter filled it herself. The filling was dainty. Volteera couldn't hold alcohol to save her life and she knew it.

"Thank you." She squeaked, taking a delicate little sip and nursing the glass like it was a pillow. "…Ah, I truly did not catch what both of you were discussing. Might I be informed? I am certain it is quite intriguin-"

"_Because it is _private." Cyrila growled.

"…_Oh._" Volteera blinked and looked down at her wine. "…I fully and completely understand and respect your boundaries, sister…"

"_Resolutions,_ you both must have them." Ignitia quickly quipped, her shoulder fins quivering. "The year's been long, and after all this time, I know it's hard to keep the head clear, but I'd love to hear about both of your plans."

"_Survive._" Cyrila muttered, half paying attention and half staring at the office's door. Her tail was lashing slowly behind her as her patience dried up.

"…Uh, well I-I'm determined to relive my ritual mastery to the fullest. I've found most of my old spellbooks from my _henning_ years." Ignitia giggled, flushing at the humor. "-Both of you must remember those?"

Volteera gave off a timid hum that was meant to be confirmative. Cyrila was silent.

"…Anyway, remastering my own technique can only benefit me. I've found my arcana rusty lately, and I want to better myself." Ignitia explained. "What about you, Volteera? You had a project of your own in the works for quite a while. It was the one with the sand and… the… color?"

"Painted glass." Volteera gave that hum again, her wings drooping. "Yes indeed, I had spent the longest, drawling, extensive periods of time molding that piece to my own sense of taste, and perfection, and accuracy."

"So is it complete?"

"…Ehm, _yes._"

"Excellent! Perhaps you should take us to your studio and allow us to shower your artistic talents?" Ignitia smiled. "I'm sure it's beautiful. What was the subject matter?"

"_Ice._"

Cyrila lazily looked up, blinking when she saw Volteera had craned her neck around and was staring right at her.

"I-It was modeled after ice." She stated. "…B-Because really, singularly and honestly, I-I enjoy the crystalline, opalescent, glittering sheen that it-"

"Volteera." Cyrila put her empty cup down and staggered off the futon, her face-scales turning red. "Just _shut up._"

**_BM BM BM_**

-Ignitia's eyes flew open.

The office.

Empty.

The memory.

_Ancient._ And really really far away.

**_BM BM_**

"I'm coming, please be patient." She said robotically, peeling herself off the cushions and onto the floor, staring at where she knew her sister had placed herself between them long ago. The carpeting had a shadow only she could see.

"My lady?" One of the dragon orderlies stood outside the door when she opened it. He looked increasingly apologetic with every one of her exhausted details he took in. "Is this a bad time?"

"Who else is going to solve the problems, a ghost?" Ignitia leaned on the frame and growled. "What the hell happened now?"

"Someone got stuck in the well."

She laughed sourly, making the orderly jump when she punched the door rim.

"_Son of a bitch._"

* * *

[🐉]

There were flashbacks he was getting right now. Black and white. Yin and Yang. How frightening, that worlds could duplicate setups and partners.

But that was a long time ago. Right now there was just high blood pressure and a raging erection that needed dealing with. The only way to quell his sword was to plunge it into a dragoness.

Luckily, two of them were here and very willing.

He tackled Morinth first for obvious reasons, the elated dragoness cackling in excitement before he sealed her chops with a slobbering tongue-kiss that saw her dark horns pressed into the cot to the point of tearing through.

Morinth gave a low volume moan into the Fallen's lips, her emerald eyes rolling back and her black body undulating into him.

Taliopia hadn't had a chance to touch her, like, _really touch her_ in weeks, and the pent-up sex-rage that Morinth was experiencing had been a nagging sensation in the back of her mind for quite a while.

However, when the Fallen had touched her for the first time back at the Dragon Temple… somehow, that silent sickness had gotten a whole lot worse.

Morinth really didn't understand it.

She had been interested in other females her entire life. Even when she was scuttling around the sewers like a bilge rat, all of her more unsavory thoughts and fantasies of the flesh had revolved around other dragonesses. She'd met Taliopia and had pursued her in her first real long term serious relationship. She'd never been touched by a male before this point…

But the Fallen's sinewy limbs, his upright build, the strange tussles of _hair_ on his person and the way he killed Dark Soldiers in battle…

Morinth's loins had been alight. So had Taliopia's. The two of them had just never outright admitted it to one another until earlier this afternoon when they had landed.

"-_Yes-!_" Morinth howled suddenly, breaking the lock to the Fallen's mouth as his hand wandered down and slipped between her hefty thighs. "-_Ohhh yes, right there-! That's… oh that is… simply lovely…~_"

Two fingers didn't suffice, so he settled for forming up his hand like he was preparing for a stereotypical Kung-Fu chop, and he slid the whole thing to the knuckle into her quivering trench. Morinth's muscles suckled him warmly and drooled copiously around his fingers. The dragoness writhed as he wiggled the joints and ran circles over her clitoris with his thumbprint.

Taliopia gave off a needy whine and propped herself over the Fallen's back as he worked, her eyes clenched shut and her tongue hanging as she ground her exposed dragon-hole into his back, her nectar running down his tailbone in trails of bronze as the window light caught on them.

The healer's work was complete, and gradually, the remaining dressings had ended up on the floor as she hugged around his ribs, licked the back of his neck and buried her face in his hair.

The Fallen felt his muscles regathering their normal strength, the last lacerations knitting themselves shut, and the bruises dematerializing. The healing potions had finally put an end to his little problem. He didn't have a mirror, but judging by how fresh and kiss-ready his face was, he knew it was back in working order and appearance.

Morinth squealed when he hooked his fingers and began to slide in and out of her, grinding his knuckles into the side of her passage softly. Her wings flapped and her body curled up to press her black breast into him. She mewled happily and lapped at his neck, egging the human on to press as much of himself into her as possible.

"_-I-I get a turn too, Morri-poo-_" Taliopia whined, biting the Fallen's shoulder and tugging at his arms.

Morinth swatted a few times at his wrists for him to calm down a bit. She crawled past his flank, her thick tail crashing into his ribs before he could blink, sprawling the Fallen out on the cot back first.

"Cheeky that, it looks like we've all been keeping secrets…" Morinth chuckled mintily, craning her haunches on either side of the Fallen's head, she lowered her hips and lifted her tail, exposing her sopping vagina to him. "…I never thougt I'd go _male_ to be honest… What about you, Tali'? No second thoughts, right?"

"_MmMMhMMmmmm~._" Taliopia muffled. The Fallen gasped.

Taliopia threw herself to sit between his knees and smother his cock. She grabbed his member at the base and began to nibble its tip, quivering and blushing so badly that her blowjob was sloppy and misdirectioned. The Fallen, of course, didn't care about the semantics of it. But Morinth did.

"You've never seen one before, luv'?" She whispered, grunting when her lips met the Fallen's. His arms craned around her meaty haunches and hooked, his jaw undulating as he ate her out and began to drink. "-_T-That's alright… N-Neither have I- YES-! Right there… that's… that's it…_"

"C-Can I… can I put it-" Taliopia gasped as she slurped away from the human's wettened crown. She jacked his twitching meat-rod off and stared at it in apprehension as the two dragonesses centered it between their noses. "…_can I put in my mouth, you think? E-Entirely?_"

"_Mmf. Mmhmff._" The Fallen gave a thumbs up past Morinth's hip. The cot squeaked as she gasped and whined, bending her knees and jamming her cunt into his face with so much mass that she threatened to suffocate him.

"Is he okay?" Taliopia craned her neck.

"_Eh, I-If he needs to breathe- _OW! _–watch it back there, you cheeky wanker! –If he needs to breathe, he'll say so…_" Morinth giggled, wriggling her hips and moaning as lewd squelching sounds echoed around the room. "…_Oh Ancestors… that's so- so-OH-!_"

Morinth even sounded like she was singing when she was orgasming. The Fallen grunted as dragoness fluids ran down his cheeks and pooled behind his neck. Her flower convulsed, milked at his lips and tongue and drooled everywhere. He had no doubt that if he hadn't acted as a sort of plug, that Morinth was a squirter.

It felt like her vagina had liquidly poked him with some invisible finger. God damn…

"I-I don't know, Morri-poo… m-maybe I should try some foreplay and-" Taliopia squeaked when Morinth fell forwards and snatched his dick from her.

"This _is_ foreplay, _Talliiiiii'…._" Morinth moaned drunkenly. "…Watch, you do it like _thi-hmmmffff…_"

Morinth gagged as she sank his member past her muzzle to the base, jamming his crown into the top of her snout as her nose pressed into his balls. Taliopia moaned quietly at the sight, her tremors becoming uncontrollable as the cot began to squeak not only from their combined weight, but also from her quivering.

Morinth looked like some kind of draconic sex-queen as she preened her wings, whipped her presenting tail and bobbed her head in the Fallen's groin, sucking, slurping and licking noisily to coincide with his own efforts as he plunged back into her hole without warning.

_I can do this. I can be a warrior. A… A _dirty_ dirty warrior…_

Taliopia swallowed in one last minute of pause.

What would her mother and father think?

Would they find out?

Did she _want_ them to find out?

Taliopia didn't have any more time to think before Morinth grabbed her horn and yanked her down to join the oral. The medic's serpentine tongue lashed out and constricted around the Fallen's sack as Morinth continued to suck him off. There was so much drool sliding down his crotch that it was impossible to tell whose was whose.

"-_Ach-… G-Give it a try…_" Morinth moaned, wrenching her eyes shut as she pulled her mouth away. She shivered and locked her thighs, a second orgasm ripping through her stomach and hips. "-_Ooooohhhthereitis-AH-!_"

Taliopia took the free moment to be bolder and tried to duplicate her lover's motions.

She immediately regretted it.

The poor medic gagged when she slipped the Fallen's entire rod into her snout. She tensed up and refluxed around his twitching meat, kicking mixed dragon gob in every direction through the form of transparent splatters. The Fallen groaned into Morinth's ham-sandwich and bucked his hips up. Taliopia gagged again when the blade punched into the top of her snout.

"…_See… i-it isn't so bad, honey…_" Morinth weakly laughed. All poor Tali' could do was make a choking noise as she tried to bob. Evidently, she wasn't as good at it as Morinth was, but credit was still due.

Eventually, she slipped the human schlong from her maw and jerked it with a few thrusts, heaving as hers and Morinth's spit dripped from her used mouth.

**_Slkslkslkslkslkslk_**

-Oh, that noise of a drool coated cock being wanked.

Morinth gave a singsong note when his hand lashed out and slapped her on the ass loudly.

Wordlessly, Taliopia was left in the dust as Morinth and the Fallen scurried to change positions. The black dragoness spun around and pounced on his chest, ripping open his smaller, puffier mouth and jamming her reptilian tongue down his throat. She moaned as she tasted herself on him, grinding her used draconic pussy into his erection.

Taliopia wandered onto the floor beside the cot, rosy eyes wide as she reasoned letting Morinth take the experimental plunge first. She _was_ after all, the fighter of the two.

"-_Guess it doesn't bother you that this was all hanging out a little while ago, huh?_" Morinth seductively chuckled, patting her tummy. The Fallen glanced down and his grinding lowered minutely.

A little bit.

Yeah, it did bother him.

But it was derg-puss.

He wasn't refusing.

"…_Let me just see him, and… prop and… OH, yes… yes…_" Morinth reached between their bellies and worked him inside her, panting like a dog as she slowly sunk further and further down. Taliopia was drooling nearby by the time she watched her darker lover meet pelvis-to-pelvis with the human. Morinth giggled and whipped her tail around. "-_H-Haa…. Ha… I think- I like- I like-_"

She moaned again and shoved her head into the Fallen's chest, squeezing her eyes shut and rolling her hips.

"-_PENIS._" She grunted like an animal. "_More. Penis._"

The Fallen grabbed her waist and snarled, merging their hips in more and more forceful impacts that rocked the cot, thudded its feet on the floor, and wetly caused a slapping noise. All of that though was deafened under Morinth's singsong moans. She really had a set of pipes.

Would someone outside in the rest of the medical wing hear?

Probably. Actually, definitely.

Did the Fallen care?

Fuck no. The derg-vag' plundering train was-a-going and there was no stopping that bitch.

He thrust into her with precise impacts, wiggling her meaty haunches and spattering vaginal fluids all around their merger.

Morinth was in another world as she rutted with the human. Her emerald eyes were upturned for the ceiling and a stupid grin was on her snout. She spread her wings, lifted her tail and drooled in desperation, bringing herself down to meet his upwards stabs again and again and again.

His blade was being driven to the absolute limit of its ability. He could feel her deeper reaches spreading and sucking around him as he penetrated her in spaced, heavy motions. Morinth's body reacted like any other dragoness he'd banged to stupidity. It saw the foreign organ as a welcome invader and spewed all over it gloriously.

Morinth sang shrilly and howled at the ceiling as she slammed down on him one final time, vaginal secretions running down from between her spread labia in boughts, causing his balls and inner thighs to glisten.

The Fallen's huffs deepened. He kept hammering into her, eliciting tiny squeaks from the overstimulated dragoness with each wet slap of their hips. Flames built in his loins and the sensation of heat simmered higher and higher until he reached his own brink. He clawed her supple backside and shoved balls deep into her.

Now _this_ was really new for Morinth.

The dragon moaned and gave off intrigued little sounds as heavy ropes of syrupy liquid bundled and pumped into her stuffed hole. She felt it swim around, run downwards and become packed like wall insulation around his jerking rod inside her.

When she bore her teeth for him and rolled her hips, she felt even _more_ of it spew out and leak past her gaping labia. Cum built up to enough volume that one of his ejaculations _kicked,_ causing a loose string of semen to go airborne and land on the cot to join the rest of the stained mess.

The Fallen groaned and slumped into the cot, spent and glistening with sweat and bodily fluids. Morinth growled approvingly and licked at the salty runoff on his neck, stroking her claws over his skin-covered shoulders and marveling at his alien anatomy.

"…_I think…_" She chortled, nipping at his chin. "…_We're going to keep you~._"

"…_3rd of Marrrrch…_" The Fallen slurred.

A light shlicking caught their attention.

Looking over, Morinth and the Fallen witnessed Taliopia with her back on the floor, legs spread, tail whipping as she went to town on herself. She fingered her winking, rose-colored slit as her eyes darted all over the mess and the connection between their legs.

"_-W-What does it feel like, Morri-poo?" _She gasped, and bit her lower chop. "-_I-It looks w-warm…_"

Morinth hummed in amusement, pecking the Fallen on the lips before sliding him out of her. He grunted as his expended member slouched over, dripping and twitching, drenched in its own cream, Morinth's cuntsyrup and dragon gob.

"…_It's filling is what it is…_" Morinth said, moaning when she rubbed her scaly belly and a small downpour of mixed fluids tumbled out of her gaping entrance and landed on the cot. "…_My Tali-wali… y-you _must_ try human flavor…_"

"-C-Can I…?" Taliopia squeaked, looking hopefully at the Fallen. She gasped when she saw that he had risen to half-height and was staring at her like a hungry predator would a fresh slab of meat. "Fallen?"

The human carefully slid out of the cot, stumbling as his own legs failed him. He wandered past Morinth who took to laying back in the cold stained sheets and fingering herself as she watched the messy goop of their lovemaking seep between her talons.

Never touched before by a _male._

And she never would be. Not by another _dragon male._ All that was on her mind was her newfound addiction to human cock.

Taliopia gave off a little '_Eeep!' _–when the Fallen's hands gently took up her hips, and he lifted her to her feet on the floor.

He directed her like a puppeteer posing his figurine. Turning her around, easing her two steps forwards, lifting her forepaws so she could grip the edge of the cot, using his foot to spread her hind legs.

"…_O-Oh my…_" Taliopia blushed pure crimson and chewed on her chops, rosy eyes cast in a backward, uncertain stare past her spread wings and sinewy neck. The Fallen slipped a hand under her heavy-based white tail and peeled the fifth limb up and over, exposing the timid healer's golden valley to him in all its drooling magnificence.

He sniffed the pheromones and allowed his eyes to dilate.

_Ho boy._

_This_ was fresh derg-puss. Taliopia was ripe and very new, despite her time with Morinth.

At least, very new to _males._

"-U-Uhm- Fall-_EN-!_" She yipped mid-sentence when he slid two fingers up and down her quivering, rose-colored slit in preparation. "-_C-Can I ask you something? B-Before you…_"

He grunted in affirmation, rubbing her thick haunches and groping her cheeks impatiently.

"Tell him, _Talliiiii',_ he won't hurt you…" Morinth sang nearby.

"W-Well… I… I kinda' like… I _like…_ uhm…" Taliopia swallowed some bile and coughed. "…I was wondering if you c-could… uhm…"

"She wants you to stick it in her cheeky bum." Morinth chirped, wing pointing at the second entrance above the primary. "My Tali's always fancied a good sticking with some toys up _that_ alley."

Taliopia blushed harder and hid her face in the rim of the cot, embarrassed.

The Fallen grunted again and patted her on the thighs. He reoriented his crown, and, with an experimental prod, Taliopia shot back up to full height when she felt him press.

"-_O-OH MY~!_" She yipped, a claw clapping over her snout. She muffled a moan as his already very Morinth-lubed head slipped deftly into the scrunched gates of her anus and spread her ring-muscle.

The Fallen huffed and ground his teeth.

Mother duck.

That was some tight shit.

He hadn't had tailsex in months. He'd forgotten how much more taxing it was in the initial stages.

Though, even drunk on arousal, he was still concerned about hurting the poor medic. He rubbed her flanks and worked the rest of his length in one bit at a time, waiting until Taliopia stopped shivering and gasping.

He knew she was ready when the dragoness cast her head back and gave off a shrill whine. She looked past her own tail and stuffed one of her claws' talons in her mouth. The Fallen hooked his hands on her feral love handles and gave his hips a good thrust.

**_Schlp_**

-Morinth giggled when Taliopia's ass gave off a slurp as the rest of his length tunneled in.

Taliopia's reaction was immediate.

She cried out.

It wasn't in pain, but the sound was so unlike her normally timid demeanor. It was much more aggressive, and _free._ The Fallen liked it.

Leaning his belly into her tail, he began a slow pattern of dragging himself in and out of her, gaining traction when Taliopia thrust back. Skin and scales clapped. Taliopia built up another series of squeaks until a sharp wail pierced the air. Her vocalizations were more spaced, not as frequent, but _louder._ The Fallen liked that too.

Settling back on his legs, the Fallen craned his chin down and hammered the white dragon's jiggly backside, jerking her with each hit and rocking her on her haunches. Taliopia cried and wailed every few moments, hiking her tail as high as it could go and spreading her legs as wide as possible. Anything to bear her tailhole for him as he used it.

Morinth slid over and caressed her chin. She eased the moaning dragoness up as the Fallen fucked the daylights out of her, and locked her in a passionate snout-kiss. The Fallen felt himself bottom out as he observed the feminine tongue-slapping, the two reptiles purposefully craning an eye in his direction as they made out. He scrunched his eyes shut and started ramming Tali' even harder.

The healer wailed again and tore away from Morinth, shoving her forehead into the cot and rocking back against him, her white, scaly haunches wobbling with each of his stabs.

The Fallen felt his balls start to well up. The quick groans building in his throat weren't his exact willing forte, but he couldn't even think straight enough to counter them as he plunged into Tali's tailhole.

**_Plat plat plat plat_**

-He leaned down and clamped his teeth on the side of her thick tail base, bottoming out one last time and flooding Taliopia's ass with his doomed children. Quite embarrassing noises etched out of him as the white dragoness' muscles milked him for all he was worth, cum soon dripping down her groin and pattering onto the ground.

He grabbed and flipped her onto her back, Taliopia giving a tense cry as she spread her wings for him and gazed lustily into his eyes. He fell on her and locked his mouth as best and messily as he could with her snout. Tongues slapping and teeth clicking. Taliopia couldn't blink her eyes at the same time as she melted into the room's floor and worshipped his attentions.

"… Wasn't it nice, my love?" Morinth peaked over the cot and smiled down at them. "Cheeky that: Spyra's been holding out on us."

Taliopia considered her lover for a moment, and then, as if her current stance was threatened, she covetously glared at the Fallen and snatched him up in her forepaws, embracing him and wrapping her thighs around his hips.

"_Mine._" She muttered, shielding his tired form with her wings and tail. "_Mine._"

"What?" Morinth's smile faded, and her tail whipped.

"_Mine._"

"What did you say?"

"_MINE._"

"Oh no you don't, my doctoring, toy-stealing 'ness…"

The Fallen popped his head out from Taliopia's limbs and blinked.

_Uh-oh._

* * *

[🐉]

"Start forming coherent sentences, or I swear to fucking god I'm lighting you on fire."

Evidently, threats ruined the possibility of business no matter who you were. Having a lack of patience for a drake who had a lisp doubly exacerbated that impact.

After the last incident, all the stall owners on that street closed shop and refused to even humor her browsing. Moles walking around started avoiding her. People stared. When it became too much, she took her foul mood to the skies and had been flying around ever since, looking for…

_…something._

Anything, really.

Anything just to take her mind off of _him._

Spyra zipped around the curve of a spire and landed on the edge of a gargoyle-lined habitation roof, her gaze falling from the golden and blue afternoon sky to the sparsely crowded intersection just below her. She adjusted her talons on the stonework rim and settled like a bird to a perch, huffing angrily under her breath.

Her luck.

The first guy she shacks up with and he's a hareming interdimensional warlord who can't keep his prick leashed.

She supposed she should've known to begin with.

Actually, she was a bit of a moron to not have seen it earlier. All the touching and flirting with other 'nesses? Where had she been? In _denial?_ Fuck that, that was for abused loser-whores sucking empty bottles and toting fatherless hatchlings.

Despite the circumstances, nothing he had said to her in that little rant of his was outright wrong. She _was_ really smart. She had to have been in order to survive roaming the untamed southern wilderness. None of that really mattered to her right now, though. She was just really pissed off and needed to hit something.

Why was life like this?

She'd spent her whole life wanting to get away from her village.

Now all she wanted was one of the Mayfly Shrine's burlap dummies so she could rip the thing to shreds and burn the shreds and then piss on the shreds' ashes and then start screaming about how _fucked_ the shreds were and-

She shivered, steam leaking from her nose.

_God damn it._

_Rawr! She was mad! Capital M _MAD.

She _needed_ to hit something.

Right fucking now.

Because if she didn't, then all the dragons' fears about her becoming a second Malefora would turn out to be true when she rampaged through the city and started burning shit.

Something hittable.

Where.

….Hmm….

No, not there. She had sunken to some lows, but something about beating the snot out of an old man was just improper.

Nah, not there either. She liked kittens too much.

Nope. That Mole was fat enough to have his own orbit. She wasn't touching that greasy, flabby crap.

_…Wait a second…_

She craned on her perch to get a better gander at someone trotting down a sideroad between two atrium complexes.

…Was that…?

Oh, perfect.

There was something she could hit.

Without a word, Spyra slipped off the edge of the roof and glided over the intersection. She whipped around the edge of a building, skidded to a halt on the cobblestone, and then reared back her fist as soon as she got close enough.

Corrinthol only had a second to let his eyes bug out of his skull before the purple fist crashed into his nose with a solid _crack!_

The drake screamed like a little girl and hurled onto his back on the street, rolling around and wailing as he grabbed his snout.

" _-AghhAHHHH-! What the hell-?!_" He screeched, and a few wandering passersby rushed down separate ways to avoid what they thought was some gang-related street mugging. "-_Why do you people do this to me-?! AHAHHHHHHHH-!_"

"Sorry." Spyra hissed, wagging her paw. "Nothin' personal, it was hit you or someone innocent."

"_I didn't do anything!_"

"You're a complete bitch, that's a crime enough, son." She flapped her wings and turned her snout up at him, harrumphing. "Anyway, that was all I wanted. Thanks for having such a punchable face, I owe you… like… I dunno', a pat on the back. At some later date. Even though I'll probably forget. But, uh, not my problem. Anyway, see ya'."

She spun around and spread her wings, preparing to fly off and continue her temper-tantrum on the rooftops as she had been doing. However, she paused, thinking for a moment as Corrinthol's pained sobs echoed around the now empty street.

_Hmm._

Spyra folded her membranes and looked back and down at the mewling pile of snot that was Corrinthol. He had rolled onto his side and was just rocking back and forth in torture, giving off these donkey-like sounds.

…_Well…_

She ran the thought over her tongue a few times. It would probably be his death warrant.

But nobody liked Corrinthol.

So where was the loss?

…Yeah. Yeah she could play this game.

"Say, friend, what are ya' even doing around here?"

"_I LIVE HERE!_"

"Huh. I had no idea. I meant on this _street,_ you whiny sack of bricks! You better give me some straight answers, Crimsonia-Motherina-Fuckfacia or I'll jam my foot up your ass and tickle the backs of your eyeballs with my fuckin' toes."

Corrinthol sobbed in absolute terror, holding his bleeding snout and trying to wriggle away from her like a tortured earthworm.

"_-H-Have mercy-!_" He screamed. "-_Ohhoooo-god-m-mother-mother help me-"_

"C'mon big-boy, you're comin' with me." Spyra snickered, grabbing the lashing tip of his tail in her teeth and yanking.

Corrinthol left claw-lines in the cobblestone as he was dragged off into whatever the purple beastess had planned.

It couldn't have been anything good.

* * *

[🐉]

"_Foot cream?_"

Spyra was deadpanned. She stared at Corrinthol long and hard as the bloodied drake teetered on his own haunches uncomfortably on the other side of the table. His eyes were darting around in an effort to stare at anything that wasn't her or one of the other denizens of the open-air eatery. Though the prior terrified him more than strangers' judgment.

A wide, street sprawled to their right, filled with bustling crowds and a few large trade-wagons that trundled down clearer sections via teams of strung ponies. All kinds of heads were turned in her direction, but Spyra ignored all of them, her purple eyes fixated on the pathetic drake in the opposite chair.

"Can I offer you anything, ma'am? On the house, via orders from the manager." A Mole waiter spoke like Corrinthol wasn't even there, his attention fixed on the legendary Purple Dragon of legend.

"Yeah, sure." Spyra lingered her eyes on Corr' a bit longer and then looked at the Mole. "Gimme' the sweetest, sugar-filled, unhealthiest drink you got."

"How about a Pop-And-Cream float-?"

"Hit me."

The waiter scampered off, and Spyra returned her attention on Corrinthol.

"Dude, don't get blood on the table, use a napkin." She growled, tossing a wad of them from the stack in the center of the table. Corrinthol flinched like she had hit him, and snatched up a clawful before wiping at the blood trails drying up from his nostrils. "So, run this by me again…"

"I-It isn't-" He snorted, and licked his snout, wincing in pain. "-for _me,_ it's… it's for my grandrake…"

"The fuck is that, a kind of rash?"

"_No,_ my grandrake, my father's father? H-How do you not know that-" Corrinthol paused as he finished wiping his snout. "…Of course you wouldn't know that. You're from the _south,_ how could I forget?"

"Born and bred with spunk." She clicked her fangs and winked, putting her forepaws' elbows on the tabletop. "That's a pretty rough day if you ask me. Just getting back from an adventure like yours, on your way to get gran-daddy some bunion-cream that he's gonna' make your sorry arse' rub on his foots, and then gettin' mugged on the way there. Damn, dude. I feel for ya'."

"You're insane." He glowered, playing with the bloodstained ball of napkins in his claw. "What am I even doing here? I think I need to see the healers… I… I think you broke my snout-tip…"

"Nah, just a nasty hit. Trust me, I know a broken nose when I see one." She tapped a talon on her purple snout for emphasis. "And you're here because I _said for you to be._ I'm just thinkin', mulling some options over, and trying to decide if I can and want to use you for something."

"U-Use me?" He snorted, glaring at her. "W-What else would you use me for besides a punching bag? Not that I've done anything to deserve this kind of treatment…"

"_Oh-ho,_ we can have a long and nasty talk about why the end of that sentence is horseshit, but uh…." Spyra snickered sourly. "Forget all of that."

"F-Forget-? _No!_ No! I'm not forgetting _that._ I'm not forgetting anything you did to me! Beating me up, letting that alien strangle me, and use me as a dynamite mule and-"

"Order up!" The Mole waiter scurried back over and placed a high-necked, quietly fizzing mug in front of Spyra. Despite her horrid mood, the feisty dragoness found herself ogling the treat hungrily as she traced patterns across gooey lumps of some alien, brown and white-colored material topped with darker brown… _stuff,_ over a liquid of caramel-color. "Will there be anything else?"

"Holy shit." Spyra gawked.

"…C-Can I get one too…?" Corrinthol blinked at the mug.

"Certainly! That'll be twenty gold pieces."

"-Wha'- but- _she gets it for free!"_ He pointed at Spyra accusingly. "That's not fair!"

"Life, dude, it steps on the poor." Spyra wing-shrugged and took a metal spoon the waiter handed to her. "I'm good for now, sir, thank you."

The waiter bowed and scampered off. Spyra snickered and stabbed the gooey stuff with the spoon, dragging off back a lump and examining it as it ran down the handle's shaft.

"What _is_ this stuff anyway?"

"…_Ice cream…_" Corrinthol growled dejectedly, curling up and pouting in his chair.

"Huh. Looks like a more appetizing rendition of the gunk we used to pull out of my dad's chitin-creases when he was sick with rot-shell that one time." She quirked a purple brow. "Bottoms up I guess." –She popped the biteful in her snout, shivering at how cold it was.

Then, her face lit up.

"_Oh my god._" She gasped, slapping her own cheek and marveling at the float. "…I-I've discovered something better than sex."

"…_You would know wouldn't you…_" Corrinthol quivered as he struggled to hold in his seething frustration, snorting as his snout started bleeding again. "Can I go now? I'm not going to sit here and watch you eat a whole float. I don't have time for this."

"I'm not done with you yet, so you'd best sit down, 'cause I _will_ scoop your eyes out with this." She said, her mouth full as she pointed the spoon at him. "_Now,_ about why I punched you in the face…"

"I don't really care."

"-I'm in a particularly bad mood and am looking for assistance to get back at someone."

"_I_. _Don't. Really. Care-_"

"-That someone is the _Fallen._"

"….Go on." Corrinthol dabbed at his snout and shifted in his chair.

"I might have an idea set up, but it involves a lot of risk. In other words: whoever I get to do this needs to be unimportant and expendable. You get the gist?"

"…Not… really?"

"Lemme' ask you, Corr', you're a single, unattractive and lackluster guy, so that means if you're one of the few of your kind to have a social circle, it's a circle of _other_ single, unattractive and lackluster guys…" Spyra explained, sipping the float. "Have any friends lookin' to chase some purple tail?"

Corrinthol's eyes bugged out almost as hard as they had when she had reared back to slam his face in.

"You really are insane. He'll kill everyone involved." He said. "And why would I help _you?_ My father knows what you and that stupid alien did to me. He's going to make you both pay, purple dragon or not."

"I get that you have daddy-reliance issues, but just hear me out." Spyra dumped a quarter of the float messily into her mouth, shivering as she fought through the resulting brain freeze. "-Don'tchya' wanna' get back at that stupid alien? That big, stupid, sexy, irresistible, crazy warrior badass alie-"

She snapped her jaws shut and drowned the snowball in another huge sip. Her cheeks bulged with pop and soda as she swallowed.

"Just give me a yes or no."

"…Okay, here's my answer..." Corrinthol snorted, leaning over the table closer to her, earning an unimpressed brow-raising from the dragoness as she chewed more ice cream. "_Screw you._"

"That's exactly what I need one of your friends to try and do."

"The answer's still no. I hope the two of you crash, burn and rot. I don't think you get it: I'm the preeminent son of an _officer._ Of the Warfangian Military. Do you even know what that means? If I shit in the street, that shit has more value than you." He snapped. "And while you sit there gorging on food you didn't earn telling me I'm a single, unattractive drake, why don't you tell that to the females I've already nested?"

"If they actually are flesh and blood and not figments of your weak imagination, I'd think the words _small_ and _fast_ would be pretty universally common among them." She sniggered.

"This coming from the hen who let herself get rutted by a _monster from space._"

"Look dude, we can go back and forth about our incomparable love lives, but I'm askin' you to go through with a common cause. I know you hate the Fallen more than you do me." Spyra tongued her spoon. "Seeing as that's the case, I can't believe you'd actually pass an opportunity up like this. So what do you say?"

Corrinthol rolled his jaw and winced at the terrible pain he'd been dealt. He sat back in the dining chair and hugged himself with his umber wings, face scrunched in either discomfort or thought, probably both.

"…I-I might know some drakes…"

"See that? I knew you'd come around." She slurped the last of the float up and smacked the empty mug on the table with a refreshed exhale. He gawked at how fast she's eaten it, wondering if she had even tasted it. "Go grab some hot-headed crotch-thinkin' dirtbag and come back. I'll tell you both what to do then."

"What are you going to do about my nose?" He narrowed his eyes. She stared at him.

"Go slap a bandaid on it. The fuck do I look like, your mother?"

"How about some compensation for pain and suffering!"

"If I'm paying up for _that,_ you better expect to be on the streets for what me and all the other people you interact with are gonna' _take_. You _breathing_ is pain and suffering. Y'know, you're one of those dragons that if they were allowed to reproduce, I actually think the world would catch on fire. By the way: you can keep the change, bitch."

Corrinthol snarled and slammed his claws on the table.

"Is there a problem here?"

Both dragons looked over to see a yellow and white-speckled dragoness stepping closer to the table. She was flanked by a white and blue drake with gray wings and horns, the latter of which numbered four. Her eyes were a striking yellow and her own creamy horns were curled outwards like those of a ram. She looked quite austere. _Pretty._

Spyra rolled her mandible.

"What do you want, Rava?" Corrinthol slumped back in his chair in defeat. "I'm having enough of a bad day without old classmates showing up..."

"What happened to your nose, Corr'?" She ignored him, squinting at the dried blood blending with his scales.

"Talk to the purple-"

"Some sociopath ran down the street and hit him in the face with a brick." Spyra shrugged. Corrinthol's jaw flew open. "What? It's the truth. That guy was fast as lightning, dude..."

"B-But you-!"

"We're the liaison appointed by the Council to escort the Fallen and Spyra during public outings." Rava said very officially, interrupting them. Spyra immediately determined that in addition to being pretty, she was a stuck-up elitist, and thus she didn't like her even more. "Where is the Fallen exactly?"

"Hell if I knew." Spyra rolled her eyes. "Maybe he's off banging that black and red homewrecking slut. _Her_ and not _me._ God damn it."

Rava stared at her like she was out of her mind.

"…I'm getting out of here." Corrinthol sneered, grunting as he hobbled down from his chair and towards the street, a wing over his snout. "Stay away from me, Spyra. My father's hearing about this too."

It was an act. At least the first part. Just so that Rava and her friend here had no further suspicions.

"Yeahyeah…" Spyra mumbled, picking up her float mug and worming her tongue around the inside to lap up all the stuff on the sides. She glanced at Rava and the other dragon. "…Well? Are you both just gonna' stand there and attract flies, or are you gonna' be my new court jesters and do a fancy dance?"

The drake chuckled and Rava growled.

"I am Rava, soldier of Warfang, and this is Windshear, soldier of Warfang." Rava used her tail to point and point.

"Oh, awesome, it's introductions hour. _Ahem._ I am Spyra, queen of all angry bitches and ice cream. Nice to meet ya'." She smacked her empty mug back down and glowered at the two of them. "So what, they're paying you to stand around and stare at me like a bunch of tards all day? You people are fucked up."

"Are you always this abrasive and vulgar?"

"If you're askin' that question, you already know the answer." Spyra grinned a little, her purple tail flicking between her legs as she lounged. "At least it's a nice day though, lovely weather, friendly faces, promiscuous aliens..."

"Here might be a question less offensive to you: where is the Fallen?" Rava was struggling to keep her temper under control. It made Spyra giggle.

_Little button pusher I am…_

"Like I said, I have no idea. Didjya' check the medical wing in the castle? He was supposed to visit Morinth and… Taliopia…" A look suddenly dawned on Spyra's face. She stood out of her chair and spread her wings, startling the two soldiers. "I gotta' go."

"Wait just a second-"

**_FWOOSH~!_**

-Spyra was already zipping up and away.

Rava closed her mouth and stomped her paw.

"And I didn't want to believe it when they said she was a foul-mouthed little shit." She muttered.

"Are we going after her or the alien?" Windshear asked.

"The _alien,_ he's the more present risk. He's not even the same species. Come on." Rava spread her wings. "Let's follow _her_ suggestion."

* * *

[🐉]

The doors were closed and guarded. She doubted anyone was going to let her in without trying to talk to her, get her attention, _hound her,_ like everyone had done earlier during her first visit.

Spyra was a ballistic 'ness on a mission.

So, she flew through a window.

It was closed.

**_Csshhhhh~! _**–the glass shattered and a purple, rolling ball of scales thwacked feet-first onto the hallway floor in the middle of the cloud of shards. Startled gasps from a pair of Moles at the end of the hall went ignored. Spyra snorted and used her horns to open a door leading out into the greater county hall.

**_Slam~! _**

-Most people would have had a very difficult time getting the attention of an entire chamber like that in one go. But the thundering report of the door rapping the wall was enough to get every single snout and whiskered nose in the joint to turn towards her.

Spyra stomped through them in an enraged bustle. When a document keeper failed to get out of her way fast enough, she walked _through_ him, sending the poor rodent man tumbling in a cloud of cast loose leaf and a startled yelp.

"_Ah! _There's the second hero I wanted to meet- _OOF-!_" Councilor Asden's fat cheeks puffed as a powerful, purple paw compressed the rolls of his great chest and sifted the fat drake over like he weighed nothing. "…Talk about the hot-headed shoulder. Spyra? Something must be very wrong, eh?"

He turned to look at Starbrun who had been chatting with him idly just seconds ago.

"_Something must be very wrong._" Asden hissed.

Starbrun closed his chops and glanced at Spyra's back, and then Asden's face.

The chubby councilor twitched, evidently spooked, pointing at her with his eyes.

"...Fine, _I'll do it._" Starbrun snapped, grumbling as he jogged on all fours down the hall after her. "Spyra? Might I speak with you for a moment? Find out what the problem is? Spyra? …What are all of you looking at? There's nothing to see here, so be back to your business." He barked around the chamber.

Asden twiddled his talons and clicked his tongue as Starbrun vanished around a corner.

"It's good gossip." He reasoned with himself sweatily. "Can't pass that tasty treat."

"_Spyra!_" Councilor Starbrun's voice called from down the stairs. Spyra had already stomped through the big red doors a story up, throwing them open with a slash of her tail.

**_WHAM~!_**

"Step aside, _bitches._" She snarled. A healer dragoness went pale as a ghost and fainted in one of the lobbies.

"Spyra, what is the meaning of this? -Oh, Ancestors!" Starbrun parted the doors, gasped, and hurried over to the fallen female on the floor, waving a paw in her face. "Ma'am? Are you alright?"

"Stand clear, I know CPR!" Asden waddled over, licking his pudgy, drool-slicked chops. The nurse spontaneously awoke and shrieked before flinging herself away and sprinting down a hall like a rabid squirrel.

_Right there._

Spyra bustled down the hall until she found the door she was looking for. There was already a small crowd gathered outside of it, and judging from the present flushes on the dragonesses' faces and the appalled slack-jaws of the males, she knew why.

"_Patient confidentiality my tail._" She sneered, rearing back a hind paw and kicking the door open dead-center with a thunderous bang. "_You're in the shit now, you 'ness hogging alien piece of-_"

Spyra recoiled.

"…_J-Just a little bit more, Tali'… oh-YES… like that~… ohhhh just like that…_" Morinth's tongue was hanging out as she rolled her hips, huffing and wedging something in her crotch before wriggling and grinding.

The black dragoness had her meaty ass in the air, cheeks flattened against Taliopia's contrastingly white colored backside, their tails were intertwined and twitching, their gaping, very clearly used pussies mashed together and sopping their wonderful drools together in swapped fem-nectar.

Squished wetly between those draconic vaginas was Little Fallen, twitching, wretching, its movements mimicking the exhausted vocalizations of its owner as he reclined in the medical cot and clawed a thigh on each dragoness as they worked him to completion.

"…_I-Is that it, Morri-poo? I-Is he-" _Taliopia looked half-dead, drooling in the cushion as she craned her head over and shook her backside, undulating her hips and grinding her opening in an up and down sloppy motion. The schlicking was loud enough that it echoed in the hallway outside.

"-_Almost there- Almost there…_" Morinth panted. "-_Ooohhh thereitis-~! OH~!_"

The Fallen became guttural as the two dragons squeezed their groins together and lifted their tails in eerily trained unison. His pink-headed crown peaked out of the squishy black and white folds and started spitting. Fresh bands of semen arced in the air and slapped in disorganized, tentacle-like patterns over the undersides of their tails, their groins and their scaly asses. Morinth was chuckling as she mashed her cheeks together and wiggled her hips, effectively creating a lewd sandwich.

"…_See, Tali'? Everything can be solved with a little diplomaaacccyyyy~._"

"-I-I wanna-" Taliopia gasped, swinging around and flecking human-jizz on the floor. "_I wanna' stick it in my girlie-hole next._"

"Yeah, Tali', get your confidence going! That's my doctor-missy it is-!"

Morinth's wide horn to horn smile slid off her face the moment she glanced and then stuck on the room's doorway.

Spyra was staring back at her.

So were at least twenty or thirty other people who had all gathered outside in the hall to see what all the commotion was about.

So was Councilor Asden who had turned pinker than a rose.

If it were possible for Starbrun's jaw to detach from his snout and hit the floor, it would have.

Morinth clapped a claw over her mouth, and _squeaked,_ suddenly sounding like Taliopia.

Ironically, the latter herself glanced over her hips at the doorway. The medic twitched, giggled, and rolled off the cot before collapsing on the floor in a leaking, unconscious heap, out like a light.

The only person who spoke in the next few seconds was, of course, the Fallen.

"…._Oh-spyywha-thankgodyer-here…._" He slurred, a finger waving in the air. "…_I-I needyerhelp…to…toshutthedoor…_"

Spyra's eye twitched.

"_...soifyou...could...coulddothat...that'dbe...that'dbegreat...thankyoudear..._"

"_HA!_" Councilor Asden howled, his flab jostling. "_You people are absolutely fucking **in-sane**, and I love it!_"

* * *

[🐉]


	30. Chapter 29 - Throwing Rocks

**Dragon(s)layer**

**29**

* * *

**Throwing Rocks**

* * *

_**{Total War: Warhammer OST Skirmish (2)}**_

* * *

They had assumed the enemy wasn't going to make another push until an hour from now. _Assumed_ being the keyword here.

That intelligence was flatfootedly wrong.

Volteera didn't have a hateful bone in her body and even _she_ wanted to throw that scout through a wall.

"Disgustingly, fabricated, obtuse and grotesque servants of darkness." She growled, her mouth opening to release a bolt of piercing lightning. The golden band danced between the shoulders of a few Moles and planted dead-center the gnarled chest of an Orc. His battleaxe flipped in the air like a boomerang as his crisped form hurled back through the minute clench in the city gates. It clattered on the street as the sole symbol of his once fearsome presence. "I say again, comrades and allies, the city will be horrifically, mercilessly _cleaved_ if the gates aren't latched!"

"We're _trying!_" A dragon snarled, his back and wings compressed to the face of the gate besides ten others.

They battled with the mob of monsters pushing into the gates like a liquid tide. Orcs shouldered through the masses and spilled into Overwatch's Eternity Square in pairs and trios, tens of spindly Grublins following in their wake. Mole infantrymen met them with polearms and swords, supported by draconic soldiers whipping tailblades, claws and teeth to dismember, slice and rip apart their prey. Consistent bolts from Volteera's maw lit the cobblestone and always ended in a blackened series of corpses being flung to oblivion as she supported the defensive.

A particularly large Orc with what appeared to be a pair of bone-strewn totems hanging from behind his pauldrons bellowed as he stomped through the gate breach and lumbered into the fray. Volteera mounted on her haunches and extended both claws before herself, a ball of flickering electricity whipping across the square that vaporized the Orc from the hips up, leaving only a stumbling pair of legs to dance for a brief moment and collapse.

"Might there be any word on where our fifth detachment squad is?" The Guardian breathed, uncharacteristically gripped by a dreadful and tired expression as she sulked in the wake of such a draining spell. "They were supposed to be here unanimously, singularly and positively already."

"The attack's timing wasn't the only botched note I think." The Mole captain by her side growled, his one prosthetic eye-lens clicking as it focused on the breach. "The offense stalled at least. It was a wise idea to put the halberdiers at this junction. We can hold them."

"Not if that blasted gate parts like the flooded walls of Stormwatch." Volteera breathed, eyes wide with sudden terror. "Word must be given to the castle! Get a runner, a messenger, a milkman, _anyone_ up to Lilith's chamber and expediently rouse the royal highness from her stupor. We can't keep them out of the city any longer."

"She's incoherent!" The Mole captain barked over the noise of screams and blade clashes. A catapult round soared over the square like a meteor and impacted into the face of an already crumbling habitation sprawl. The commonhouse vanished in a blare of dust and crumbled in on itself like a block of paper. "We've tried reasoning with her, but the Queen's gone completely bonkers! We're on our own out here, my lady."

_What would Ignitia say?_ Volteera swallowed.

"Of _course. _Look there, that'd be alarming." The captain waved at her to get her focus and pointed with his polearm. "Mind helping me with this?"

Could she even refuse?

The captain sprinted on his stubby legs for the flank of the halberdier formation. A black catapult shot laced with volcanic veins burst apart on the street and sent debris everywhere. It looked like corpses were rolling through the wreckage and dust. But these Dark Soldiers had emerged from the lobbed shot very much alive and armed with steel.

They were chucking their own men over the walls. With filthy, earthen creatures such as themselves, the strategy was apt.

The captain skewered a green, snotty Grublin through the gut and footed the quivering cadaver off with a summary bash and slide on the cobblestone. Volteera landed with a graceful leap and pulped two of the monster's friends under her forepaws in a pair of inky blood-splatters. They both dedicated to the front and kept it as fringe elements of the halberdiers broke off the flank and made to control the secondary breach. At least here there wasn't a funnel. If they could kill the landing parties fast enough, there was a guarantee of absent reinforcements behind them.

Nothing about it though, was reassuring to Volteera.

She had been in Oversight for over a week, fighting every single day up at the front, killing Grublins, getting tackled by Orcs and shot to shit by arrows. As she swiped and clawed to death monster-soldier after soldier, she snarled in a draconic wheeze of pain as a black line and fletching suddenly protruded out of her breast with a sharp _crack!_ as the arrowhead punctured her rotund bellyplates. She swiped it away with a bat of her paw and kept fighting.

Volteera grit her fangs and lashed out at the Orc Archer responsible, grabbing him up in her claws, the Guardian wrenched her knuckles into his guts like one would punch a finger through clay, and she tugged until bones crunched and flesh ripped. The Orc flew away in two halves trailing black intestines.

A Grublin buried its shortsword half to the hilt through her thigh. Another Grublin made a ragged incision across her ribcage.

Volteera screamed and swung herself around like a top, her tailblade swiping in a complete three-hundred and sixty-degree angle. The Grublins collapsed in twos for each one, separated from their own pelvises.

Still, it was too much.

Eternity Square was getting overrun, and she couldn't stop it.

"_Trolls!_" Someone hollered.

Suddenly, the gates- just as they were teetering to a fully shut stance –burst completely open.

A lumbering abomination as tall as a house stampeded through the dust, swinging earthen fists that could crush wagons. The halberdier formation wavered as the Troll brought its great arms down and flattened a handful of men into bloody stains with a thunderous crash. The beast shrieked, its unsettling voice greatly resembling the pained squeal of an obliviously violent child. One of the gate doors flew off its hinges as a second Troll battered through the breach, followed by a third, and a fourth.

…a fifth, a sixth…

_Oh no_, Volteera swallowed.

The halberdiers broke and started to run. Men screamed as boulder-fists crushed them to death and sent their comrades flying through the air in hollering bundles. The Trolls smashed the infantry line like it was made of tinsel, and scores of Grublins flooded around their heels to finalize the push and attack the scattered remnants. It was becoming a bloodbath.

Volteera gave a barking cry and fought through the terror flooding her veins. She wreathed her body in glowing electricity and barreled through a wall of Grublins and Orcs, trampling them as they jerked and twitched from being cooked alive by her magical aura.

One of the Trolls shrieked as she drew near, raising a massive, earthy fist to smash her like a bug. Volteera leaped over the arm as it came down and put a crater in the street. Her wings flapped and gave her enough weight to land across the Troll's face, where she clenched like a rat on a log in rapids. The Troll screamed and reared on its hinds, swiping futilely at its head.

The dragon channeled all of her Mana in a last-ditch effort. She snarled as bolts of lightning coursed down her arms like glowing veins and spread across the mossy flesh of the monster's misshapen skull. The Troll's screams became shriller and the distinct sizzle of cooking flesh became audible in the air. Volteera cried out in rage as the last of her power drained from her like blood. The air flashed white, and the crack of a cannon defeaned all the Dark Soldiers scuttling around the beast's heels.

She tore from the parting remnants and landed back on the cobblestone. The Troll's corpse teetered and fell in a heavy heap, headless, its neck stump coughing soot. She had popped it like a can exposed to extreme heat.

"Retreat!" –Officers hollered. Mole arquebusiers wielding golden flintlock rifles peppered the monsters from high up on the city walls to try and cover their comrades. The gunshots were almost as frequent as cries for routing.

"Ma'am-" The captain from before stumbled over, his arm severed at the elbow as he leaked a crimson trail at his feet. "-the gates-"

Volteera picked the Mole up like a child and deposited him on a drake's back, sending him and his Wing off with a nod.

"Indubitably, fall back!"

An Orc raggedly screamed and hacked at her head with a morningstar clenched in its ugly claws. Volteera ducked back from the blow and ran him through the chin and out his cranium with her purple tailblade, black blood misting in the air.

_I don't have to tell anyone that I'm covering._

Volteera's chops quivered as she killed and killed.

Bleeding, taxed and desperate, she felt a tangible reality settle in on her with its sour stench. She was always the weak link in the four of them. She was the only Guardian in the troupe who would dare to wonder such a question in the midst of battle…

_Why me?_

A terrible scream ripped through the air and grew in volume.

Volteera finished slicing a Grublin from her path, and looked up just in time to see a black shape with piercing, white eyes darting down right for her face.

"_Cynder._" –Was all she had time to utter.

* * *

_**{Dragon Age Inquisition: The Descent OST: Battle}**_

* * *

The black dragoness snarled and plowed into Volteera's breast with the weight of a train. The blow connected with such force, that the sound of a bat smashing off the side of a brick wall echoed across the plaza. The dragonesses locked claws and sailed across the square, Volteera's back taking the impact as they hit a building's flank and caved through the wall in a blast of smoke.

"Hello, Volteera. It's been awhile." Cynder sneered, shaking herself like a dog as rubble poured around them and bounced off her horns and wings. Volteera sputtered as masonry dust got in her mouth. "You don't have anywhere more important to be, I'm sure. I need your help, and I'm here to requisition you for the job. Does that not sound lovely?" She grinned evilly.

"A-Assistance? Given to _you-?_" Volteera coughed and squirmed. "I'd sooner give up all pleasantries, p-pastimes and-"

"_Oh god, do you ever shut up_." Cynder mumbled, hauling back and decking the Guardian right between her eyes. Volteera's head jerked into the stone pile with a crack, her limbs convulsing. Cynder examined her work with a clear sense of pride. "I didn't think it would be this easy. And I thought _Ignitia_ had gotten rusty…"

Volteera's limp form went rigid, her claws gripping Cynder by the wrist cuffs in a quick jolt. Before the black dragon could tear herself free, the air lit up brighter than the sun, and terrible _terrible_ pain bloomed all across Cynder's body.

**_BZZZZZZTTTT~!_**

Cynder reared her head back and screamed at the top of her lungs as penetrating bolts of electricity shot up and down her body in coursing patterns. She could see a concurrent flashing of black and white. Her body quivered like it was caught in the center of an earthquake and soot began to leak out of every one of her orifices. Had Volteera not been so concentrated, she would've been appalled as a pool of urine gathered between Cynder's trembling legs and ran down the sides of the Guardian's belly.

Even beaten and bruised, the normally bubbly Electric Dragon maintained a fierce snarl as she began to cook her opponent.

Some elaborate string of labyrinthine insults were most likely planned in Volteera's head, but all the lightning whipping around wasn't exactly a serene kind of environment to concentrate on such things as an angry speech.

She hadn't seen Cynder in what felt like ages, and their last interaction hadn't been too dissimilar to now.

What Volteera wanted to know was why _here._

Cyrila would probably know, but she was up in the mountains overlooking the city, and had more consistent contact with the rest of the Dragon Realms. Volteera had been boxed up inside the walls in contrast the entire time and thusly hadn't heard anything about the Terror of the Skies approaching the coast.

If rumors were to be believed: hadn't Cynder suffered a terrible defeat due south at the hands of the Purple Dragon and a new mysterious warrior who had fallen from the sky?

She certainly looked pissed off enough for it: bearing all her fangs, screaming and roaring in the flashing madness around them.

…Though that might've all been because she was getting electrocuted to the point that she'd pissed herself.

It was hard to tell with Cynder.

Volteera hacked as a quivering, black claw snatched over her throat and compressed, her larynx crinkling like bubble wrap under Cynder's crushing grip. The electricity flow faltered. It was all the Cloud Ripper needed.

Desperate, Volteera slashed Cynder's breast and sliced across her belly plates with her tailblade. The black dragoness snarled through the pain- still twitching as occasional sparks licked across her scales –and lifted Volteera out of the rubble by her neck.

The Guardian burst out the other side of the building in a blast of debris and tumbled into the messy street. Cynder limped through the wrecked breach, eyes sweeping across her hips. Her snout crinkled when she picked up her own detritus on the wind.

"…Cyrila was somehow _less_ trouble." She growled. "You made me soil my beautiful coat."

"-T-Truthfully: it was in the least beautiful to start." Volteera spat, shaking dust from her horns and forcing herself to her heels. "Cyrila will best, smite, overcome and defeat you should you seek her out."

"I hate it when people are naïve past-tense." Cynder stood on her hinds. "I hate it more when I need underdeveloped ditzes like you _alive_."

**_Thwack~! _**–Volteera snarled as a crushing backclaw snapped her head aside. Cynder shrieked when that evil tailblade hooked from the right in response and sliced open another patch of her belly plates. Now she was drenched in piss, sweat _and_ blood. Every second this went on was just making her angrier.

"How is it that such a pathetic little wurm became a Guardian anyhow? I've more respect for your sister of fire, Ignitia, and I've been trying to tear her face off for the last decade!" Cynder cried, stalking in a loose ring around her as Volteera steadied herself and preened her wings threateningly. "Do you see everything that is happening around you? Look at Oversight, Volteera! It's _aflame._ What did the Council really think you were going to stop?"

"Intricacies of our politics are simply beyond a barbaric, single-minded destroyer such as yourself." Volteera spat. "I may not have the ferocity of Ignitia's genius, or the cold absolution of Cyrila, but I warn you, mistress of heathenry and hell: underestimating a Guardian is a fool's move."

"Your monologuing mimics your reputation," Cynder snarled. "-_empty._"

A red barrier flickered to life, and a trio of lightning bands from Volteera's maw ricocheted off its warbling face and hit buildings on either side of the street. Cynder leaped and spun her lithe form in a corkscrew, a whipping Cyclone of Wind tossing bricks and rubble everywhere, bathing the whole street in a deafening tornado's howl.

Volteera grit her fangs and clawed into the ground as she started to slide across the cobblestone. She staggered herself by spreading her limbs, wincing when a brick bounced off her forehead and left a bleeding cut.

She tried to bathe Cynder in a torrent of electricity that illuminated everything around both of them in a miniature sun's glare. The Cyclone caught the lightning, and it began to circulate up and down its spinning length like yellow veins, absorbing the Mana completely. Volteera's eyes bulged.

Her own element began to sicken and brighten, becoming a ghastly shade of neon green as it whipped in loops through the wind funnel. Cynder landed and clapped both paws in front of herself towards the Guardian. The green bands of energy flocked around her like fireflies and channeled past her wrists in a concentrated, reflected stream. It hit Volteera in the breast and sent her cartwheeling.

She smashed flat the shattered remnants of a logistics wagon burning on the side of the intersection, her world rushing, and burning pain invading her sternum as Poison solutions began to eat into her scales.

When had Cynder become so much more powerful?

"_Enough!_" The Cloud Ripper sailed through the smoke and landed on the splintered wood to pin her. "_You're coming with me, Guardian scum!_"

Volteera shrieked when Cynder's tailblade came down and stabbed something. At first she didn't know what it was.

The Guardian glanced down and felt her jaw go slack.

Her upper bicep.

Cynder's silvery, curved blade was entering one side and sticking out the other.

The pain was so overwhelming that she couldn't even scream. Some might have labeled Cynder as _merciful_ for bringing down both her fists and smashing Volteera's head into the crumpled wood, tenting it inwards like it was paper. At least the flames in Volteera's nerves ceased.

The last thing the Guardian saw was the pair of claws hammering down towards her. She closed her eyes before the impact, and, strangely, a flash of memory struck her before the end.

It was a brief phantasm of Ignitia's face.

**_Crunch~! _**–boards splintered and Volteera's body convulsed in a final throe of agony before deflating in an eerily stilled exhale. Cynder grinned maniacally and limped off the wagon's corpse to examine her work.

Poor Volteera sprawled in the wreckage like a yellow scaled, purple bellied corpse.

If she wasn't covered in grime, blood and lacerations, she would've been beautiful, like the rest of the Guardians. She supposed they were all really forbidden Sirens anyway. It was always the damned _celibates_ who had the big hips and curves.

"….Oh, Volteera, I can't recall a time I've seen you so sad-looking before." She spat blood on the street and flicked her wrist to begin a healing spell on her slash wounds. "You were always the weakest of the four."

She shouldn't even have known that, Cynder considered in the pause.

Were the Guardians so significant enough that their personas had been projected across both sides of the lines?

Yes, probably.

But that wouldn't matter soon if her plan worked.

Requisitioning proper placement for Cyrila had been easy enough. She doubted Volteera would be as much a pain in _that_ regard.

Besides, Cynder knew the right place to store her prize.

She grinned and began to trot over to Volteera's limp form.

-Then something blunt and heavy crashed into her snout from above. She heard scales crunch, and a terrible agony bloomed like flames in her face as blood curtained from her nose and spattered on the street.

Blinded, Cynder stumbled back with a snarl, the breath leaving her body as a heavy form slammed into the street and assaulted her again. A feral snarl etched through the din of surrounding chaos, the macehead swung from the flank and cracked into her ribs. Cynder shrieked.

**_Pnchh~! _**–a fist took her head to the right in what was the first of a _barrage._

Cynder was reduced to an uneven series of gasps, squeaks and coughs as tens of punches battered her ringing skull back and forth one after another.

**_Pnch-pnch-pnch-pnch-pnch-!_**

-She lost count after four.

A raspy, feminine voice howled a cry of defiance, and then a pair of wings swiped her feet from under her, sending Cynder in a sprawl on the cobblestone.

She tried to channel her Mana, but didn't have a chance as her attacker mercilessly plunged into the assault. Sharp fangs sunk into her tail just below the mid-cuff, making the black dragon scream.

Her opponent spread their paws wide and heaved their sinewy, muscular neck in an arc, dragging Cynder into the air, swinging her from the west to the east.

**_Crsshhhhh~! _**–she ate the street, cracking stone and scales with a grunt.

Her attacker snarled- grinding their fangs into her tail to draw rivulets of seeping blood –and Cynder was swung back the way she had come.

**_Crssshhhh~!_**

-The street didn't taste nice, and neither did the coppery fragrance of her own flesh-juice.

Cynder's form blurred as she was smashed back and forth in flickering heaves west and east, two divets forming in the street as her body crunched home and left each time dragging trails of dust and globules of blood. She tried to spread her wings to force air-flow to her advantage. Her attacker brought her down one last time painfully.

Then, they mounted Cynder's prone back.

Cynder roared, a funnel of Shadow fire erupting from her throat as she craned her neck over and vomited elemental death in the enemy's direction. She was blinded from pebbles and blood in her eyes and couldn't see the effects.

A swift punch corrected any false hope.

Cynder snarled, her head bouncing off the cobblestone. A paw gripped the back of her crown, lifted her up, and then planted her beak into the street with a violent thrust.

**_Crnhchhh…_**

-She wriggled her agonized mandible, feeling a tooth ride a river of blood and spit out the side of her snout.

Through all the pain, she wanted to laugh.

_Holy Ancestors, I'm getting the shit kicked out of me._

She was airborne, with wind whistling. Cynder hit a wall and fell down a landslide of smashed bricks to the ground. She coughed and writhed in the rubble.

A mighty dragon almost two times her size heaved as they trotted through the dust towards her, a tail tipped with a cudgel-studded mace calmly swaying with each roll of her voluptuous, muscled hips.

Terradora snorted and spit on the street, green eyes narrowed at the prone Cloud Ripper in silent judgment.

Truly, she looked like a statue, even in the peril of combat. A silent executioner who dealt suffering and death and humbly said little for it.

But at least this time there was a peep.

"_Back off._" –Was all she uttered.

Cynder slurred laughter and opened her mouth so all the excess blood and mucus would dribble out.

Oh, Terradora, still so anticlimactic and theater-hungry…

"…I didn't have an appointment with _you._" Cynder burbled, snake-tongue running across her chops and flicking crimson. "This was between me and your bond-sister, mountain-hen."

"What goes for one goes for four." Terradora's voice sounded like the stone she manipulated. Cynder hacked as the massive Earth Dragoness stood on her hinds, gripped her throat and peeled her from the wreckage like she weighed nothing. Terradora looked terrifyingly regal in the smoky ambiance of Oversight's burning infrastructure. _Massive_, and silent before she spoke again. "Cyrila: where is she?"

Cynder spat blood in her eye.

The Earth Guardian chucked her like an oversized baseball. She hit a stone fountain and broke the neck clean out of the foundation with a blast of masonry dust.

Terradora didn't need to proclaim it.

She'd break every bone in Cynder's body if it meant slowly slicing the information of the Guardian of Ice's whereabouts from her. Terradora was, after all, one of the most feared tacticians in the Northern Armies, _and_ possibly one of the only Warfangians who maintained an unofficial station as _chief torturer._

"Where?" Terradora parroted, hopping over the cracked dais of the fountain and snatching Cynder up from the rubble.

"W-Where would the fun be if I told you?" Cynder choked, smiling.

Terradora tossed her into the dais rim, positioned her spinning head on the edge of the bowl, and then heel-stomped her on the temple.

**_Crunchh~! _**–the stone blasted apart, and Cynder's face was buried in the dust and pile. Her body leaped like a chicken's would after being beheaded.

"_Where?_" Terradora monotonously asked again.

"_Mmmff-p-too-!_" Cynder blew a rock out of her mouth. "_Call me naïve: but I think you're going soft on me._"

"We will test that."

"Some of the Night Dragons on the Continent claim you have a skeleton made of solid steel." Cynder remarked. "Up until our last few get-togethers, I didn't quite believe them, you understand…"

"It's natural for the weak to make stories about what they fear." The Guardian rumbled, a paw compressing Cynder's spine between the wings. "Where?"

An Orc ran out of the smog and swung an axe at Terradora's face.

The Earth Guardian leaped back and swung her mace-tail as an afterthought, liquefying the Orc from the hip-up and sending the floppy, shattered body cartwheeling. More Orcs and a small swarm of Grublins flooded into the intersection with warcries and shrieks. Terradora snarled and batted out her paws, sending shattered corpses from her sight with each swing. She opened her maw and glowing stalagmites materialized out of thin air before rocketing through breasts and stomachs with morose squelches.

Cynder snarled and crawled out of the wreckage of the fountain.

"Nono, look _this_ way, you brutish bitch!"

Terradora ripped an Orc's head off with her taloned fingers and spun around to meet Cynder's voice. The black dragoness vaulted backward off her fores and mule-kicked her with both heels in the snout.

The Guardian reeled. Cynder's tailblade diced with the speed of a katana and opened a shoulder, slashed her chest and drew a divet in her forearm. The Cloud Ripper opened her mouth and a crimson wave of her Siren's Scream enveloped Terradora in its shrieking, blood-red light. The Guardian grunted and curled in on herself as nightmares of her own personal demons bracketed her relentlessly. Cynder finally puckered her chops, and sent Terradora down the street with a howling blast of Wind.

The green and brown dragoness flipped and crashed through the shingled roof of a house. Cynder grinned and limped to where Volteera was still incapacitated.

If only she had the ability to take _both_.

Flying away with this load was harder than the last.

* * *

[🐉]

* * *

_**{Halo 3 ODST Soundtrack: More Than His Share}**_

* * *

The drum was beating in tune with her heart. That's what opened her eyes.

_Initiation._

Rubble crashed and bricks tumbled. She sputtered and shook herself, offended growls crawling from behind her clenched fangs.

_No, not that. Long time ago, that. Here and now? _

Terradora blinked as her memory jogged. Then, her expression darkened to the point of such extreme anger, that her scales would've begun to turn crimson had she stood still long enough.

_No drums. My comrade sister._

Volteera.

"_No._" Terradora grunted, her head lowering as she stumbled out of a collapsed partition of the building's wall. The intersection was bare, minus the slaughtered bodies of her prior victims, the destroyed wagon and the fountain.

But Volteera and Cynder were gone. That meant that Cynder had _two_ of the Guardians now. She knew because of the panicked remnants of Cyrila's unit that had flown back to the lines, all of them babbling incessantly about how the Terror of the Skies had interrupted the battle and carried the Lady of Ice off.

This was just _perfect._

She didn't think a crapshoot like Oversight could keep getting worse. Somehow, this fucking war kept finding ways.

A catapult shot careened through the air and implanted into the center of a fat commonhouse. The building erupted from the inside as the explosive bulge detonated and sent streams of flipping rubble everywhere. Terradora grunted and curled up as mounds of crushing bricks and beams hurtled down on her.

There was a flash of light, and a magically conjured sphere of levitating rock surrounded her.

When the rubble finished falling, the Guardian of Earth burst out from several feet of piled debris and strode from the wreckage as if nothing had happened.

A hazy, gray fog flavored with soot was falling over the city streets as the sound of battle loomed overhead.

Terradora squinted and tried to see the sky.

Nothing. It was too black because of all the fires. She couldn't get a bearing for any direction Cynder might have gone.

That meant that secondary priorities came next. Volteera's fate would have to wait, as terrible as that sounded.

She needed to reach Castle Crownhorn. The outer defenses of Oversight were collapsing, and that was the planned secondary fallback point.

Navigating the soot-filled streets which were gradually becoming flooded with Dark Soldiers, however, was sounding more and more a tricky bit of business by the second.

But Terradora never shied away from a challenge. Normally, she purposefully sought them out.

More stocky and muscular than her fellow Guardians, Terradora was lumbering as she sprinted on all fours down the narrow alley-streets of Oversight, opting to shoulder through overturned carts and burning market stalls instead of leaping over them like her sisters would have.

Luckily, much of Oversight had been evacuated. Any civilians not hiding in the lower catacombs of Crownhorn had been squirreled away in daring night trips into the wilderness. Unfortunately, after that initial grace though, Terradora wasn't aware of any of those refugee parties or their current states. The war had plunged the entire Daragon Coast into chaos.

The first batch of unfortunate Grublins numbered at least forty, being led by a trio of angrily snarling Orcs with greatswords.

To Terradora, that wasn't even a challenge. She killed half the detachment just by trampling them in her initial charge. After that, it was all quick lashes of her tail-mace, her claws, and a few bolts of stone from her maw. There was a road of bodies that she left in her wake.

Terradora hopped over an overhang bridge and landed in the recreational square below. She spun through the grass like a top, leaving a quad of hair-like, curling rents from her claws digging into the earth. Serrated leaves made from levitating rock flickered around the edges of her spinning form like the blades of a buzzsaw. A troupe of Grublins lunging at her died as they practically threw themselves into a giant blender. Reams of entrails and severed limbs flopped all over the place. She even grabbed an Orc by his gnarled head and crushed it like a grape in her paw just to make a point.

Ancestors, how her fury was positively _boiling._

Cynder.

That deranged, evil bitch.

What scheme was she up to this time? Kidnapping the Guardians? Normally, she was just trying to _gut_ them, and ironically enough, Terradora found herself preferring the Cloud Ripper having intentions of the latter over the prior.

At least then, there wasn't a foreboding sense of mystery.

The Dark Army didn't take prisoners.

But then again… Cynder had never adhered to Malefora's military doctrine, and normally ran around with her own marauder bands organized from her Ape lackeys.

Why was she acting alone and without support? The Grublins and Orcs weren't behaving in concert with her, and some of them even appeared surprised to see her. That meant that Urukal wasn't in on the plan…

What had happened down south? Nobody could get a straight answer, and she flatly refused to believe the crazy shit about some alien-thing falling from the sky and wiping out Chieftain Visigoth's entire tribe.

_A warrior like that could not exist,_ she reasoned as she ran. _Because _I've_ never heard about them._

Panicked yells and the clash of steel caught her attention. Terradora stormed up a winding stairwell and flung herself through an atrium arch and into a suspended garden square wedged between a trio of large steeples.

A Wing of dragons was besieged from multiple sides by droves of Grublins and a handful of Orcs. For every beast they killed with claws, horns and blades, another two sprung forward like eager crickets into the chaos. A blast of deathly frost erupted into the crowd and froze a batch of Grublins solid where they stood.

Ice Dragons.

Part of Cyrila's unit that had broken up above the Solemn Pass. They must have landed right as the gates had fallen, smack dab in the center of the refreshed enemy offensive.

Terradora snarled and threw herself into the thick of the fighting without a pause for tact or concern. _That_ was where she differed from her sisters. Ignitia was a thinker, Cyrila an outlying opportunist, and Volteera a skirmisher.

Terradora was the only one in the order willing to be the _wrecking ball_, and she was quite good at it.

Corpses were flying everywhere as she slaughtered her way through the stringent mobs of Dark creatures. Her tail blurred in graceful swings, sending a dead Grublin this way and that with each arc. Two Orcs turned to face her. Terradora jumped, tucked, and became a glowing, conjured boulder in mid-air. She landed on the first with a wet crunch and spattered the Orc across the street. His fellow growled and swung at her with an axe, the head deflecting off the rock with a flash of sparks.

Terradora burst from her prison and sent wickedly sharp shrapnel careening into the mobs, slicing out eyes, running through faces and gashing torsos. When the Orc staggered back, she gripped his throat in her paw and crushed it to the thickness of a scrap of paper with a simple flex of her pawpads. When the body fell, the head snapped off the strings holding it and it rolled away.

"My lady!" An older drake breathed, tailblade flickering and casting the separated pieces of a pair of Grublins into the air. "Your aid is appreciated."

"Name and rank." Terradora grunted impatiently, spinning around and fighting side by side with the Ice Dragon.

"Blizzren, lieutenant. These wyrms are mine."

Terradora uppercutted an Orc and scythed him into two peeling halves from the belly up.

"Cyrila's unit?" She huffed.

"Yes ma'am."

"General orders are for Crownhorn. Were you-" She reared on her haunches and barked a magical word. A boulder shot out from her paw and barreled into a cluster of Grublins, crushing bones and shattering limbs. "-were you cut off?"

"We landed in the thick of the fallback." Blizzren staggered back when the fighting lulled, his yellow eyes wide in awe at her powers. "We sent a messenger for Lady Volteera, but the unit was mauled before he could return."

"I found him." She said, pausing not only to kill, but to force away a look of pain from what had to be said. "Volteera was taken."

Blizzren only hissed, directing his soldiers with a paw as they leapt forwards, reptilian bodies curling, undulating and jolting as they battled into the thick of the mob. "That means you're in charge, ma'am."

"Organize your dragons to the castle. I will cover your retreat."

"I will stay with you."

Terradora tore her mace from an Archer's guts and nearly clipped Blizzren's head off when it swung past his shoulder. The drake staggered back, wheezing.

"A-Aye aye." He croaked.

"Who else came down?"

"There's more of us trapped in the street-section over there. Cyrila's adjutant, Colcrus, is with them. They linked up with a Wing of Zappers before they were pocketed."

Terradora nodded and grit her fangs, slashing, hacking, kicking and biting. She swept her mighty wings with a feral roar and sent bodies tumbling before her like a landslide of goblinoid limbs.

"_Run!_" She snapped. Blizzren wheezed and obeyed, him and the rest of the Ice Dragons backing up towards another street heading north. Several of them took to the air, and soon, the whole unit was gone.

Terradora shrieked and painted the street around her in a black ring of wet entrails. She threw the Orc's corpse through a commonhouse window and stared down the wall of Grublins that had backed off from the arterial spray. They brandished polearms and blades like a fence of pointy, steel death. She preened her wings and snarled at them, making the whole formation leap back tensely. She frowned.

None of these opponents were worthy.

She advanced suddenly, stampeding through the front ranks , ignoring hundreds of enemies as she took off towards the sounds of the _second_ battle unfolding a little ways ahead. Many of the Grublins futilely hopped on their cloven heels, yipping and hooting in disappointment as their prey distanced herself beyond their reach. The handful of surviving Orcs left stared balefully up at the Guardian's belly, beady little red eyes narrowed in hateful contempt.

Terradora looped over the burst shingle-dome of a tailoring shop and beat her wings. She passed over a line of rooftops, temporarily breaking the barrier of the soot choking the sky.

A wide view of the city gridded with rising smoke veins blinked into existence for a clawful of seconds. The gates were not too far away for them not to be visible from the distance. The streets surrounding the plaza were undulating, like a living carpet of ants was flooding into the city. The amount of Grublins they were against was appalling.

Oversight was lost when the wind changed and smoke ate away the eye in the soot. Terradora dipped her scarred nose and dived through the blackened hell without comment.

She landed on the street in a thunderous crash and twirled herself to bat away a cluster of Grublins immediately. Her mace crushed tiny plates of armor, snapped bones and pulped organs. The ruckus of several tiny bodies meeting her weapon's kiss almost drowned out the following chorus of varied screams.

Draconic cries intermeshed with the clash of steel and hoots of monsters. A large cluster of Ice Dragons fought side by side with a Wing of Electrics, their white and yellow bodies contrasting the dark of the streets. The air flashed as bolts of lightning ripped through Dark Soldiers. Icicles as sharp as arrows burst out the backs of skulls and punched into guts.

Dragons died in spectacular and gruesome displays as mobs of Grublins sliced at their heels and tails to drag them down, and Orc teams would scramble over to hack at joints and necks like woodcutters to lumber. An Electric drake gave off hideous shrieks as he was stabbed and prodded from multiple angles by encircling little beasts. An opportunist Orc waited for him to send a cone of lightning into one of his smaller kin before stepping forwards, and slashing his great axe across the dragon's face. The drake twirled off his heels as the blade widened the gap between his mandible and upper oral hinges. Another Orc beheaded him the moment he hit the cobblestone.

"Colcrus?" Terradora barked, covered in blood and grime as she reached the beginnings of the draconic line. A blood-covered Ice hen staggered back from her, eyes wide in surprise at the sudden appearance of the Guardian of Earth. "Where is he?"

"There!" She pointed with her burnt wing. "He has the snout-horn, m'lady!"

"_Colcrus!_" Terradora howled, ripping and rending as she skirted the front of the unit-to-unit divider line. An arrow crunched nearly to the fletching through her muscular shoulder. Terradora eviscerated the Archer's face with a hurled stalagmite, and dragged her wing up her bicep to snap the arrow away without even a flinch. "Organize a retreat! I'm your cover!"

An Ice Drake matted in Grublin and dragon blood spun to meet her with a dazed expression. He was battered and bruised, and the chest plates layering his breast looked indented, like he'd been rammed by a cannonball.

"The Cloud Ripper took her!" Colcrus cried, eyes wild as he killed. He only met her gaze for a second when she neared him, then it was back to slashing Grublins in the face. "The Cloud Ripper captured Lady Cyrila!"

"I'm aware." She pulled a Grublin's spine out through his ass and tossed the flapping wet remains over her wing. "Now _fall back. _I'm ordering you."

"Most of the forces were able to reach Crownhorn?"

"I do not know. Find out for yourself or be dead."

"_Right._ Y-You came from the west, is Blizzren…?"

"He's already done what you haven't. _Run._" Terradora gripped him by the throat with a bloody paw. "_Run._"

Colcrus honestly didn't come off as an idiot to her. He _was_ however obviously suffering the backlash of shock, if his darting eyes were any further proof.

Idiot or not, giving into weakness in the midst of a battle was dishonorable. Terradora's snout crinkled, as if he stunk like death to her.

"Just go."

She shoved the smaller drake away and shrieked angrily as she spun back around and dragged her mace through the front wall of the enemy. Orcs and Grublins screamed as bones shattered, armor crunched like tinfoil and flesh squelched.

"Volteera isn't with her." An Electric Dragon heaved as Colcrus stumbled beside him. He saw the look in Colcrus' eyes and growled. "…If _that's_ the case…"

"Crownhorn's the secondary rally point." Colcrus coughed when the corner of a building burst apart and vomited dust across the whole street. "-The wall garrison is heading that way too, and so is Blizzren's clutch."

"How are we supposed to hold the city without the Guardians?" The other drake mumbled as the air whooshed, and the Wings peeled off from the engagement and shot up into the sooty sky. "You don't actually think the wall garrisons are going to be able to seal everything off, do you? All those street-level flights!"

Colcrus was still hacking as his pale wings flapped and took him through the blanket of smog.

"I think I can only process one disaster at a time..." He gasped, glancing at the drake. "Colcrus."

"Manetic."

"Where's your sergeant?"

"Missing his fucking head."

"I'm sorry."

"We've lost, haven't we?"

"Terradora still lives." Colcrus shook his head, risking a glance past his streaming tail. He blinked when he realized that he was positively dripping in dark Grublin gore all across his coat. It was so thick on his legs that it resembled piled paste. "At least Cynder didn't take her too. As long as we still have her, it means the Ancestors are giving us a chance."

"Cynder's never done this before."

"Done what?"

"_Taken_ people. I'm used to her swooping down and killing us." Manetic grunted. "This isn't a coincidence."

"None of this madness is a coincidence, just _look._" Colcrus snapped over the wind. "We are getting butchered! The Pass being blocked is sending all of Urukal's forward advance elements _back_ towards the northern walls. We just dammed a rising flood."

"Cyrila's plan? It's backfiring just like that? But it was mapped out to a _pin,_ you Ices never leave half a meal!"

"We were ambushed too soon." Colcrus shamefully admitted, his eyes quivering. "The Cloud Ripper was enough, but before that, there were-"

"_Wyverns!_" Someone cried.

Colcrus craned his sinewy back and gawked in horror.

A flight of crimson, serpentine and undulating beasts riding rib-fins dove under the glare of the sun behind the sooty clouds straight for them.

"_Scatter formation!_" One of the sergeants called belatedly. Dragons roared as they turned on their hiplines to point their bellies at the sky. They brandished bladed claws and tail weapons, locking talons and steel with Wyverns that collided with them at the chest.

Colcrus rolled and whipped the shortblade on the end of his tail in an upwards loop. A Wyvern staggered off its flight path and careened to the city below with its throat opened and leaving a trail that fell after it.

"Do you think they sent a messenger?" Manetic cried, now slicked with a spattering of blood that wasn't his.

"To _where?_" Colcrus barked.

"To Warfang." Manetic licked his dry chops. "To get the Purple Dragon?"

"Gods," Colcrus barked. "_Gods_ they better have! Or this city is done for!"

* * *

[🐉]

"What is there to say? You saw, I conquered, and a whole batch of people aren't getting any sleep tonight. At least it isn't like the _security issues_ your less scrupulous fellow Councilors assumed we'd make…"

"Are you actually going to disrespect our ancestral and judicial chambers right in front of my snout?" Starbrun gawked at him, insult not even present in his quavering voice. The poor old drake looked like he'd seen a ghost. A perverted ghost that had, like, mind-raped him or something… "Was this afternoon not enough?"

"That depends on who you ask." The Fallen tapped his fingers on his arms. "Satisfied parties might be less, ehm… _enraged._ But then again: don't count Spyra into that group. If I actually die in this world, it'll be because she stabbed me in my sleep."

"A-Actually, by the way she made it sound," Taliopia nervously fiddled with the tip of her tail in her paws. "-I-I think she wants to cut off your…_"_

"_Enough,_ please! Ancestors praise silence: _please!_" Starbrun wailed, tossing back into his futon with an audible creak from the wooden legs. "If I hear another adulterous slur, I'll advocate the dungeons for you, alien, and revoke your military privileges for both of _you,_ Morinth, Taliopia."

"That's an awfully cruel jump, sir. I hope nobody's forgetting that we shut the door." Morinth rolled her eyes. She noticed the fierce expression on the Councilor's face, and blinked. "All of this would have been hush-hush, if _some-hen_ didn't go completely _boonnkkeerrrrssss~…._"

"D-Do you think Spyra hates us?" Taliopia whispered/gasped. "Oh my god, I-I can't deal with that, Morri-poo! S-She's the only _friend_ I've ever had in years! I can't lose that now!"

Morinth and even the Fallen quirked a brow at her.

"A-A friend that isn't my _friend_ friend friend…" Tali' stammered, hugging herself in her own futon. "…I mean, she's very… ehm, _pretty,_ I guess? She's beautiful, actually. B-But I wasn't thinking of her like I do _you_, Morri-poo, I was…"

The healer suddenly had a look of horror about herself.

"Oh my god… I… I mated with –with-" She gripped her face, eyes wildly gluing to the Fallen. "-_I mated with a **male~!**_" –She shrieked.

"I know, absolutely, what is actually wrong with us for mixing up the bag..." Morinth sighed, rolling her eyes away from her gaze as she patted Taliopia on the paw. "Can't we stay prim and break this down for what the full extent of it can be, sir? Disorderly behavior, at the cheeky worst. Me and Tali' were… _out of line,_ but there wasn't an offense involving physical harm, or destruction of city property-"

"I broke _doors_."

Everyone glanced at the back of the room, where Spyra was curled into a fetal position facing the wall. Her tail whipped as she refused to make eye-contact with anyone inside the office.

"And a window." Asden chortled beside Starbrun's large, ornate desk. The latter glared at him, and the fat dragon's jocular expression slowly slid off his face like a vestigial flap of flesh. "…_Yes_, the Purple Dragoness is correct. Property was damaged. But, and- I'm talking from behind my own tail here –nobody was _hurt,_ Morinth is correct there."

"It does not matter if anyone was _hurt._ This kind of behavior is unacceptable. It's outlandish! This is something I would expect to be punishing a pair of overeager, hormonally driven, immature, fresh-shell stinking _whelps_ for!" Starbrun held his face in a claw. "_Public mating displays?_ Alien! _Fallen!_ Whoever or _whatever_ you are: what kind of world do you come from where people think this is okay?"

"I don't know." The Fallen shrugged. "I barely remember wherever I came from. For all I know, people back there maintain themselves as a society of nudists."

"As _what?_"

The Fallen opened and closed his mouth before looking around the office at all the clothes lacking dragons.

_Oh,_ yes, right.

"I just remember all the places I've been after there and before here, alright?"

"_Yeeppp,_ fightin', burnin' and fuckin' 'till your balls turned to magma, I'm sure…" Spyra mumbled under her breath.

"Other worlds before this one? Oh, holy drakes in the steeple, now you've got me chomping at the bit to hear such riveting tales of-" Asden paused mid-sentence when Starbrun's glaring returned in force. _Slip._ Off went the expression of joy again. "…What I meant to say was that whatever laws you've lived in before do not apply _here,_ in our city."

"Correct." Starbrun nodded sagely, still reclined in his red-padded futon in a daze. "…Very wise of you to say, Councilor Asden. But forgive me, my mind is in quite a place after… _that,_ whatever it was we saw in that room. That… _thing._ Those… _activities._"

"Aw fuck, you sound like a typical privileged old man stuck in a chapel-rut." Spyra growled. "I don't think I wanna' get all wrinkly like you guys. I just broke the golden seal like, what, three or fours weeks ago, and I've clearly had a longer, funner time than ya'll combined… You talk like _Ignitia_ and she's dustier than _Cynder_ now…"

"If it's any consolation: I have no greater urge than to purge your foul mood and plunder your vaginal hoard." The Fallen blurted out, craning past the spine of his futon to look at Spyra.

Starbrun had been reaching over for a glass of ginger-ale on the top of his desk. The cup broke noisily on the floor.

"I apologize for the communication errors back at the swamps, Spyra. But, part of a larger poon gallery or not, you are still my greatest find here."

"…Fuck you." Spyra shivered nevertheless, her eyes dilating as his first comment sent chills up her back.

_Oh Ancestors…._

She…

She still wanted to-

After all _this?!_

_No! Bad purple-momma'._

"Quit lookin' at me, dude, you're banished from the Queendom of Spyra, and ya' ain't getting back in." She chanced a second-long glare at him before reaffirming her vision to the corner. "Besides, looks like you aren't missing what you already had, judging by the two _sluts_ in the futons there…"

Morinth was visibly bothered, twiddling her claws and clenching her jaw, knowing Spyra _technically_ had a point. Taliopia was sobbing quietly, suppressing her heaves and instead jolting in her seat with each wrack.

Asden exposed his fangs and went wide-eyed, examining the row of guest seats in front of the desk. He suddenly felt a little sweaty.

"…Mmph. The Chronicler must be having a truly interesting time watching all of this, because it's colder than an Ice's wing in here all of a sudden." He mumbled, edging away from Starbrun's desk and towards the office door. "…I think that I hear someone calling my name in the lobby! Pleasant ados, drakes, hens, _Fallen._ All's well to end well and… andyougettheideabuhbye-"

"Councilor Asden, I haven't adjourned your-"

**_Bmmm~!_**

Starbrun jumped when the door slammed shut and Asden vanished. He growled under his breath, soot leaking from his nostrils as he stared angrily down at the ginger-ale and glass on his carpet.

"I haven't had a day where I've hated my job in thirty-five years." He mumbled, leaning his forepaws on the desk and tapping his talons. "It hit me like a Stone Golem the last time too."

"_Pfft,_ know how that feels…" The Fallen sulked. He glanced out the office window at the view of golden Warfang below. "I think now, that I'm sitting here with this ugly air, I'm coming to realize how stagnating this could become. Not that that's anyone's fault."

"Stagnating? I haven't had my mind changed so strongly in a long time, for the better." Morinth grinned giddily. "And, you do look so much _better_ when you're not wrapped in dressings…"

Spyra snarled.

"Dragons are going to be…" Starbrun wasn't listening as he mumbled to himself. "…_pah,_ I don't even know _what_ they're going to be. Angry? Shocked? Sickened? I expect a mix."

"Speaking out of term, sir: but no one's requiring you to stoke the fire outside of any witnesses." Morinth chimed. "It isn't like a representative from the express papers was standing in the door."

"You seriously didn't see that Mole with the courier cap in the back scribbling away in his little notebook?" Spyra incredulously glanced at her over her wing.

Morinth blinked.

"Oh." She smiled. "Shit."

"At least you can get a guarantee from one person in this city that his reaction is _not to care._" The Fallen shrugged, standing up from his futon. Spyra laughed sourly behind him. He ignored her. "The incident is completely in a misdemeanor's sense, actually, it's _below_ that, given the worst I've seen here and elsewhere."

"A _miss-da-meenor?_" Morinth cocked her head. "Cheeky that. I'm unsure about… whatever it is you said, Fallen, but private matters aren't grounds for severe punishment, especially ones regarding the purposeful walk-in of an outside element."

"Oh _yeah_ Morinth, big bad girl over here, throwin' the Purple Dragoness under the train like a champ'!" Spyra clapped her forepaws. "Go on, Starbrun, make my day and side with the fuckin' peanut gallery. What's the consequence? Huh? You're gonna' throw _me_ in a cell?"

"I cannot punish the Purple Dragon." Starbrun sighed in defeat. "Not that I wish to do that regardless. But you are supposed to be the crowned symbol of _hope_, not just to this city, but to the entirety of the Dragon Realms! What will people think when Warfang imprisons the savior of our species? It'll cause such a morale-drop, that I fear what the results might be for many theaters. Our borders could collapse."

_Figure that, my sexscepades nearly brought down a kingdom. Again._

The Fallen put his hands on his hips and sighed.

"What's done is done." He shook his head. "There's still a war and I have to help you win it. I should be deployed with Spyra as soon as possible so we can start doing that. I've been hearing so much about the Daragon Coast, why not start there? That's where the other Guardians besides Ignitia are deployed."

"That was the original plan once the Council had approved it…" Starbrun said.

"We're out of time to approve anything. We need to act." The Fallen looked at all three of the dragonesses around him. He noticed Morinth and Spyra exchange a venomous glare, but he also noticed them both soften into expressions of sadness afterwards.

Oh, there he went again, letting the libido destroy everything around him like a fucking bulldozer. Kingdoms, armies, _friendships…_

_Again._

"Looted Ape equipment isn't going to cut it anymore, and I don't have access to my equipment." The Fallen looked down at his jumpsuit judgingly. "I'm switching the talk back to what's most pressing. I need weapons, armor…"

"Does none of this matter to you?" Starbrun weakly gestured to the three hens.

"Nothing except getting under tails and killing stuff matters to him." Spyra snapped, standing up and trudging for the office door. She paused in the frame as she opened it and stepped outside. "I'm going back to the academy so Ignitia can start my training. If anyone needs me, they can eat my ass until I feel good and damn ready to talk again."

"I can eat your ass." The Fallen held a finger up. Spyra shrieked in feminine rage and slammed the door shut so hard that the frame cracked. "…I tried."

"I might have to take you _upppp on thaaaatttt~…._" Morinth giggled drunkenly, her tail lashing around his ankle. Taliopia's crying had ceased, and her head was perked up to watch the two of them. Starbrun gawked when the normally sheepish medic narrowed her eyes and licked her chops.

"Get out of my office!" He said. "Understand that me and many others are greatly disappointed in you. We expected better behavior from dragons and… and _aliens_ of your stature."

"I rarely do what people expect." The Fallen held his hands up. "I'm just saying."

"Stand right there." Starbrun pointed a talon at him, freezing him on the spot. When Morinth and Taliopia still hadn't gotten up, he waved a wing at them, shooing. "I told you both to _leave._ Please!"

"We'll be outside, mmkay?" Morinth giggled, brushing her hip against the Fallen's leg as she passed. Taliopia shyly waved at him and let her tail bump his legs. Starbrun looked sick as the door shut again, leaving him alone in the office with the human.

"…Where do I even _begin_ with you?" He growled, his normally beautiful, blazing scales dulled almost seemingly by his mood, but in reality because of the hue of the office chamber. His eyes still pierced through the shade like miniature fireballs, narrowing at the Fallen and burning through his forehead. "I found you blunt, Fallen, but I honestly believed you were more composed than this, and in control. I now see that I was wrong."

"You're free to think what you want. All I need out of you is three things: shelter, information, and _weapons._ I'll take care of the rest." The Fallen leaned on the front of his desk, eyes dangerously shrunken as he stared the larger drake down. "Putting aside how we feel about each other, let me just say that I can assure results as long as I have proper logistics behind me. I've fought with many armies before, ones with more technology and superior tactics than your world will ever conceive or utilize. I've noticed your Mole warriors wield a variety of ballistic weapons, finely crafted melee blades and ornate steel. Their metalwork is coveted, I can tell just by looking at their product."

Starbrun took a deep, rattling breath, swallowing any further anger he sported towards the human to get down to business.

"…How do _humans_ wage war?" He folded his talons and flicked his muscular tail. "You have two hands, two feet, it can't be too dissimilar to the Mole-folk."

"It isn't, just with more stature." The Fallen smirked, sitting back down on the edge of his futon. "I have a list, if it helps."

"So tell me of the details."

"A polearm weapon, a short to medium slashing base, something compact that can shoot, a crossbow, a pellet-flinger, a _pistol, _it doesn't matter. A suit of fresh armor with minimal layering. I bet the Moles could work wonders with mail and scales. I need the flexibility to do my work properly. A visorless helmet, and enough space to carry rations for a week of travel."

"Very specific of you."

"Yes. It's what I've told every other warlord, emperor and general who's taken me into their fold, at least when I went through my first portals. I normally have my own equipment for these kinds of things, but the people who sent me here wanted to make it as hard as possible for me, so my equipment has been scattered all over the realms in large containment pods. I was on the one that Spyra found in the swamps." He paused, blinking as Starbrun took it all in. "I need a temporary rig so I can find my gear. Once I have that, your war is over, you _will_ win."

"Why? What kind of gear are we speaking of?"

"Technology that is lightyears ahead of anything ever invented here. If I can get my hands on all of it, it will be virtually impossible for any combatant Malefora can muster to fight me and hope to win." The Fallen explained. "Can you put me in contact with your finest blacksmiths?"

Starbrun sighed again, giving him one last glare before sliding out of his futon, and gesturing for the office door.

"I believe I can arrange that." The Fire drake rolled his jaw. "Come with me to the castle forges. We're going to have a chat with the armorers and engineers."

He paused.

"And thankfully, they're all _male._" He sneered.

"Even if they weren't, you have nothing to worry about." The Fallen cringed. "I don't do _rodents._"

He blinked.

Actually, technically not true, he mentally reminded himself before following Starbrun.

* * *

[🐉]

* * *

**_{Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion OSTl Minstrel's Lament}_**

* * *

"…Morri-poo, I'm confused. I feel really _really_ bad about all of this, but at the same time, really _really really _good too…" Taliopia played with her tail as she curled up on the stone bench, self-consciously like she normally did when stressed. "We've never involved another person in our relationship before, and I kind of liked having the Fallen be with us for… _that._ I've never felt that good before."

"I have a feeling it will all work out my doctoring 'ness." Morinth smiled at her briefly as she paced in front of the bench. Taliopia peered at her in shock.

"…W-What? You don't even have a little bit of… of torn-upped-ness about everything right now? Morri-poo, we just mated with a _male,_ a-an _alien male,_ and we cheated with him on Spyra! The _Purple Dragoness!_"

"Just because it will all work out later doesn't mean the road isn't covered with boulders." Morinth sighed, her black wings deflating as she examined her own paws on the street. "I'm not going to say though that I entirely regret it. Spyra is a good soul, indeed, but… but the _human…_" She licked her chops and hummed. "He was _taassstyyyyy~…_"

"Y-Yeah…" Taliopia gulped, rubbing her arm amid a blush. "I kinda' want him even more now. D-Does that really make me a slut?"

"I wouldn't worry about it. We've always split our pies anyway." Morinth smiled. "We get the Fallen, and we win the war, and we live happily ever after. It can really be _thaaat simmpleeee~._"

"…Yeah… but Spyra's still sad, and angry." Taliopia curled up again. "You think I can buy her something nice? Maybe cheer her up?"

Morinth clicked her tongue and doted lovingly on the white dragoness.

She was so _naïve._

But there was pure-hearted innocence in that naivety, at least outside conditions of the flesh up until recently…

"As cute as the suggestion is, I doubt a teddy-dragon is going to make up for today."

"Maybe we could… uhm…"

"Hmm?"

"…_let her join in…?_"

Morinth closed her mouth and pondered, staring off into space.

…Huh.

Well, it wouldn't exactly be a bad idea-

"_Oi! You're the alien exhibitionist everyone's yapping about!_" Someone down one of the castle side-paths cried in the distance.

"Be careful, I might just flash you or something, and you'll go blind." The Fallen flexed his eyebrows and sent the small gathering Moles scurrying with a few frightened yips. He rolled his eyes and finished walking over to the bench where Morinth and Taliopia were. "Afternoon, ladies."

"Fallen!" Morinth chirped, bounding over and throwing herself into his chest with a squeezing embrace. "What took you so long? Me and Taliopia have _so much_ we want to do with you…"

"I'd love to, but…"

Morinth frowned as he looked down at her. He clicked his teeth and tried a different angle.

"I really would like to, Morinth, Taliopia, but I have preparations to make back at the academy and the castle. We're preparing to deploy outside the walls tomorrow before this fireworks show you folks have going on, and immediately following too, actually."

"The Comet Festival!" Taliopia gasped, slipping off the bench and trotting to stand beside Morinth. "I completely forgot about that! _Ooo! _Morri-poo, I _love_ the Comet Festival! C-Can we go? Please? Please?"

She looked at the Fallen.

"C-Can _you_ go with us, Fallen?" She blushed, smiling hopefully.

"…Uhm…" He glanced in the direction of the academy, purple invading his thoughts. "…I-If I'm not stuck in another warzone. Of course I can."

Taliopia squealed happily.

"Well that's a date." Morinth laughed. "But taking into account your cheeky and busy schedule, maybe you'll at least have an hour to… _treat us to a late lunch?_"

"…Ye-uh-no-uhm-_eh…_" The Fallen chewed his tongue, eyeing around the recreational squares flanking this side of Castle Wyrm. "…Maybe just an hour."

Taliopia squealed again. His ears were ringing and some passing guards stared.

"There must be eateries in the worlds you've been to before here." Morinth took his hand with her tail and yanked him along as she drew beside Taliopia. "You'll have to tell us about all the things you've seen, all the _sonngssss~ _you've heard…"

"I don't know many songs." He stammered.

"So we'll have to teach you _our_ songs then~." Morinth flapped her wings, matched his height and pecked him on the cheek. She yanked his arm harder when he paused. "Grab his other hand, Tali', so he doesn't wander off…"

"_Halt!_" A feminine voice called from behind them. The trio turned and saw a yellow scaled dragoness, and a blue and white scaled drake tiredly trotting over. They were just folding their wings, and they looked a little winded. "…By order of the… _*pant* -_Dragon C-Council… w-we're here to be… _*pant*_ the alien's escort…"

Taliopia looked hurt, like the new dragoness had brazenly insulted her despite not even speaking to her. Morinth let go of the Fallen's hand and sneered.

"_Back off, Rava, he's with us._" She snapped, wings and tail spreading in a combative stance.

"Huh." The Fallen scratched his hair. "I guess you both know each other."

"Morinth? T-Taliopia?" Rava stopped in surprise for a moment before more cautiously pressing forward. "What are you both doing here with the alien?"

"Would people stop calling me an alien!" The Fallen sighed. "I'm a human! _Hue-mahn._ Human-human. Is that really so hard to pronounce?"

"Huh, it _does_ talk." Windshear grunted, eyes bugging out of his head. The Fallen narrowed his eyes at him.

"I'll warn you that the gloves have been off since I crash-landed."

"Sorry, no insult intended." The drake chuckled, stepping forwards without any fear and extending a claw out. "Windshear. This is Rava. The Dragon Council put us in charge of being your escort outside the academy motte."

"…Ah, yes, my new shadows. I can thank good old Condor for that detail." The Fallen clenched Windshear's cold paw briefly, looking now at Rava. He smiled. "Madame', a _pleasure_ to make your acquaintance… What lovely scales you have, nearly gold when the sun catches them. Scalewash? Obviously high quality."

Rava blinked rapidly, like she'd had a spotlight blared in her face. Her wings twitched.

"_-A-Ahmm-_" She stammered, flushed. "-l-lovely weather we're having?"

"At least he's more civil than the Purple Dragon was." Windshear grinned.

"-Uhm-" Rava slapped her chops. "-did you say something?"

"I'm sure the Council can appreciate an escort already being assigned before both of you. We have it under control." Morinth slung her tail over the Fallen's waist and gently started to usher him backwards with her and Taliopia, the latter of whom stared at the path and refused to look up. "And the Councilors should be ashamed of themselves, assigning an unright dragoness such as yourself, Rava, for such a job."

"M-Morinth, wait, I-" Rava reclined when Morinth growled at her and gnashed her fangs. The Electric Dragon looked hurt. She turned to Taliopia. "Taliopia! It's so good to see you! I've been trying to find you for such a long time, I wanted to speak with you and-"

"_Don't you even look at her!_" Morinth snapped, shielding the quivering healer with a wing. "You already did enough! Don't you have someone else to harass? Or is Windshear too much for you?"

Windshear looked confused for a second. Then, his eyes bloomed in a sort of awkward recognition. The drake coughed and folded his wings quaintly, looking off towards another street.

"…_Yes,_ I think I understand." He mumbled, nudging Rava with his elbow. "These are the hens you had… _issues with_ back at the academy right?"

"And afterwards too!" Morinth looked positively furious. "I warned you once, Rava, you stay away from Taliopia, or I rightly swear, under heat from today or not, I _will_ break your cheeky face!"

Rava opened her snout to speak again but closed it, her tail drooping as she shied back and placed her forepaws under her breast.

"…I just wanted to say to both of you that I was-"

"We do not _carrreeee~._" Morinth tugged and shooed, corraling her charges away. "Feel free to follow us if you must, but me, my doctoring 'ness and our _human_ are going for a nice late afternoon. No offense, Windshear, but you're _both_ not invited."

"None taken." Windshear creased his chops, standing beside Rava as they watched the three of them move farther off. The human craned over Morinth's mothering wing and gave a sheepish, farewell wave to them. He glanced at Rava and coughed. "…We need the exercise anyway, right? Keep in shape for the next deployment?"

"…_*sigh* _yeah…" Rava grumbled, pawing a pebble on the ground. "Let's just go already. Have you eaten at all?"

"Not since second breakfast."

"_Second? _Do you ever think with anything besides your stomach, Windshear?"

"One, you asked, second, I thought enough to keep _most_ of my comments inside here." He poked his temple. "You, uh… wanna' talk about it?"

"No, actually."

"Right. Lunch is on me anyway."

"It's almost dinner time." Rava looked up at the darkening sky, the sun just beginning to go into the first phases of setting.

"So _lunchinner_ then." Windshear chortled. "They'll have to deal with us getting a nearby table. But we'll stay back, okay? No need to be more confrontational."

* * *

[🐉]

Flying back to the academy was easy. She'd already memorized a lot of the streets and plazas by this point, her inner-explorer still brazenly active and blaring despite her foul mood.

Spyra waited in the Guardian Temple, pacing around the lobby and flipping through some books that she had no vested interest in, before she decided to go into the training chamber by herself, just to look around.

She liked what she saw.

The chamber was sunken in a center dais eight feet deep and surrounded by an ankle-height guard. The floor was carved into the draconic symbol of Warfang and the walls were ribbed with buttresses resembling massive, Lung-styled dragons that curved and warbled up until their jaws unhinged and merged into a wavering, domed ceiling studding with glowing green and red gem clusters, each contained in star-shaped linings of pure bronze. Torch braziers flickered between each buttress on the upper ring's level, bathing the whole expanse a warm amber to contrast the green-red glow faintly shimmering above.

"…_Wow._" Spyra grinned, walking loops around the chamber, looking at everything, touching the wall décor. "This place is righteous."

"Yu should see some of them shrine chambers on the uvver side of the halls you should. Nice and sparkly gatherings those be too, just like this one."

Spyra frowned and watched as Palmet waddled into the chamber with a stupid grin plastered on his long face. That ugly little shittopus he carried around, Meep, was peering at her quietly over his shoulder.

"The hell are you even doing in here, monkey-boy? Get out. Don't make me throw you in the ring and fry your ass for kicks." She nonchalantly dismissed, turning back to feel up the carved scales on one of the buttresses with her paws. "You're the Fallen's _servant_ or some shit, right? Don't you have something to sweep or mop up?"

"Actualleh, you'd be amazed at the proactiveness I've rightly demmonostrated and such over the last few hours." Palmet was either too stupid to understand her insults, or was ignoring her. She didn't put enough stock in him yet to believe it was the latter. "Me and Meep got down ta thinkin-"

"Now _that's_ a lie." Spyra chuckled, pointing her tail-leaf at him. "You haven't used whatever little puke-ball is inside your head for, like, _evva'._ I'll put money on it, a _lot_ of money."

"…got down ta… thinkin… yu know, yu realleh are a cold draggy inside." He pointed at her blankly.

"_You don't need to tell me!_" She cackled, her sour musings echoing sharply.

"…Ah. I was jus gonna say that me and Meep already swept and mopped the whole temple we did."

"…What?"

"Its true it is. That lovely little livin space the nice fire-drag lady gave us had all these nifty cleanliness supplies lying about, and so we was thinkin that in the meantime, ya know, with nothing else to really do, me and Meep would repay such generousness with a good janitorialness. Cleaned every chamber. Top to bottom we did."

"…Huh." Spyra swept her pawpad on the little guard rail, rubbing her fingers together and noticing the lack of dust. "I haven't been here long enough to notice the grime I guess."

"An now ya nevva will, within the good ole job we did! Meep's a natural with feathadusters, and I fancy them brooms to a good point of stormin perfection." Palmet snapped his fingers. "Me an Meep should open up a cleanin service we should! I bet this whole drag city is filled with dusty devils and nasty crusties under the beds. Now that we're good guys and pursuin the ends of justice, we have ta consider our economical futures."

"That's all it takes for you Apes? Someone on the other side gives you a job, and just… _poof,_ you got all their ideals now." Spyra shook her head.

"Yeah! …Ain't it… Ain't it always dat simple?" Palmet stopped on the opposite side of the ring. "Why else do ya work if ya ain't doin what ya gotta do for reasons ya fink are right, eh?"

She suddenly harbored an expression like he had struck her.

"Just when I thought my day couldn't go into another loop." She snarled.

"…Oh, ehm… I can rightly apologize I can, if'n I caused ya grief there, purple-drag. Maybe me and Meep could clean out that new and fancy room of yers ya shackin up in with the Master! If it makes ya feel better. We didn't touch it on account of him threatenin to tear my eyes out and all…"

"You can make me feel better by shoving a sock in it." She murmured, clicking her talons and sighing through her nose. She stared at the sigil making the dais floor below. "Did you see Ignitia at all? I kinda' need her here if I'm gonna' start training."

"Not since earlieh this aftanoon I haven't." Palmet had come back from out in the lobby chamber outside, he was toting a bucket heavily sloshing with sudsy water and a pair of dingy brooms. Meep was chirping eagerly with a trio of dusters clenched in his black tentacles. "I'm certain she'll sort ya out propeh when she comes back frum her errands and whatnot."

"Thanks for the confidence." She rolled her eyes. "And it ain't up to me about that room. I'm… I'm not staying there anymore."

Palmet almost tripped over the bucket, whirling around and blinking.

"-Say wha now?"

"I didn't speak in tongues, did I?"

"B-But- But Master's got you in his highest sights and-" The Ape went silent when she gave him a terribly cold death-glare. Meep shivered in fright and hid in his mane. "…Uh, alright, nonnuv my bidness I'm seein rightly. But you were both tighta than bread and- and… _more_ bread jus this morning!"

"Bread went rotten, just sod off with it, dude." Spyra spat, wringing her talons on the guard bar.

"But he's the best Master there is! Bettah than Cynda!"

"Don't _mention her._" Spyra barked. "And how can you even say that? He kicks the crap out of you just when he feels bored! You're like a… a _spare Corrinthol._ Except he doesn't break you_ that_ bad, he just sorta', like… slaps you around and shit."

"Small price ta pay for total freedom I'd say." Palmet hugged his brooms. "I ain't evva been able to trot around like I have tah-day in the geyserlands or that stupid tower, with my own room, my own bucket and mops, and my own Meep."

"**_Meep!_**"

"Yeah-ha! He's got it he does!" The Ape saluted her and waddled off. "Hopin tu ya feelin better there, purple-drag, as long as ya ain't blaming me for more fings I didn't break. It took me awhile to clean up all them pottery shards frum earlier! Don't brek anuvva of the things ifn ya could…"

"**_Meep!_**"

"No, Meep, it's rude ta ask for tips it is. _Ah! _It's the nice drag-lady who smells like a bakery! How is ya, lass?"

"Did you… _tidy_ the temple while I was out?" Ignitia blinked as she and Palmet stepped around one another in the doorframe. She tested the air. "It smells quite clean."

"I'll take dat as a job well done I will. _Welp! _Back to my fancy new room it is then…"

Ignitia opened her mouth but couldn't find anything proper to say as she watched Palmet lumber off. The poor Fire Guardian looked as if she was in a daze of some kind.

"D-Did he really clean the temple?" Ignitia looked across the ring at Spyra.

"I'll take his word for it." The purple dragon defeatedly grumbled, trying not to meet Ignitia's eyes. "…_Soooo,_ how'd your day go?"

Ignitia shut a large gold-barred door behind her, closing her eyes for a moment to listen to the frame's impact echo around the chamber. She sighed in content and smiled.

"Very busy. Very busy indeed. There were ledgers, papers, entire wings that needed to be cleaned out, and, of course-" She giggled, her left eye suffering a brief twitch. "-_someone_ fell in the well again. HmHm." Another twitch. "How about you, Spyra? Your first day in the City of the North! Oh, how exciting. I can't wait to hear all about it, why don't you come with me and we can find a bench in the garden squares outside, under a nice oak tree, and I'll bring us some sandwiches and some of that lovely rice-pudding they make at the residence hall and we-"

"I, uh… my day isn't over yet, a-and I'm kinda' hoping yours isn't either." Spyra stared at her talons, locking up. Ignitia's tail swayed curiously behind her as she rounded the dais guard and approached her.

"…_Oh,_ i-if it embarrasses you-" The Guardian cleared her throat. "-if _I_ embarrass you, I completely understand. W-We can stay inside the temple, and I can request to have dinner brought to us. It's whatever you're comfortable with, Spyra. I want whatever works best for you."

Spyra clenched her jaw.

Now she _really _couldn't look Ignitia in the face.

Something yanked at her in her chest.

_Cometcu._

Spyra felt an encroaching dread settle inside herself. This was the first night after she had willingly left her village and adoptive family behind.

So, what? The world turned and was basically offering her another maternal outlet? Shouldn't that have been a blessing?

Why did it make her feel so _gross?_

"Spyra," Ignitia sat at her side, facing her and curling her tail around her paws. "…if this is going to be your new home, then I want it to be _perfect_ for you. Anything that you need, and it will be done. But I do only have one request, and… I would enjoy talking with you, even for a little while."

"Talking about what?" Spyra mumbled.

"Anything." Ignitia had said that one word in a starving voice, her face painfully strained to keep her usual doting smile. "I want to talk about anything with you."

"…Why?"

"Because-" She choked up, stifling it away with a cough. At least it was getting easier to stave off: the emotion. "… Because it's _polite_ of a host to provide for their guest, and you and the Fallen are indeed our guests. So, how about dinner then, to end the day while you tell me about it?"

What was there to tell?

How her perception of the Fallen had become all nasty and cracked up like a broken wad of glass after she'd inadvertently discovered her arch-nemesis had had her grubby claws all over him? Only found out _while_ she was giving him head? Or that she'd stormed around the city being rude and brash to every single other dragon she came into contact with? Or that she'd walked in on the Fallen having a threesome with a pair of 'nesses who were supposed to be fucking dykes?

Damn it, Ignitia's pleasant smile was pissing her off.

Why was she always so good at _looking_ happy? Spyra couldn't do that. When she was pissed, she _looked_ pissed.

She knew Ignitia was practically on the verge of crying all the time because of how stressed she was, and how distraught she was over the period of time she hadn't known Spyra, the hatchling from the egg she'd fallen in love with as a juvenile nurse. Spyra wasn't naïve like that. She knew skill when she saw it, and Ignitia was skilled as _hell_ at keeping her mood hidden from other people.

"I want to start my training."

Ignitia started, her smile slowly fading off her snout.

Spyra blinked, not even realizing she'd spoken until a few seconds after.

There was a long moment of silence.

And then…

"…O-Oh…." Ignitia squeaked, looking around the empty chamber as if searching for someone to help her. "…uhm, I mean, _w-why? _And why now? And… D-Did something happen out in the city?"

"There's stuff happening _outside_ this city." Spyra swallowed everything and refused to speak of it. She hopped off her haunches and landed in the center of the dais, her claws clicking against the ancient stone. She looked back up at Ignitia and flashed a grin. A _fake_ one. But she had learned to do that from the best. "I'm never gonna' be able to take on the Dark Master without perfecting my elements, and you can teach me how to do that with my favorite one: _fire._"

"I-I can." Ignitia clawed the guard rail and watched her closely down there. "But it's only your first day here, shouldn't we do that tomorrow? When you're fully rested?"

"I ain't sleeping anyhow." Spyra stomped her foot. "Now c'mon, you said something earlier about magically animated dummies or some crazy shit like that. This training ring sounds like the bomb. So…. _Professor:_ show me."

* * *

[🐉]

…_Ick._

Grublin blood.

It tasted like rank goat shit mixed with oil.

And the stuff was in her fucking mouth.

Terradora spat a few times and suddenly wished she had fire breath to burn away any traces of her battle. Being a dragon certainly had its benefits, but being forced to rely on your claws, your horns and worst of all your _teeth_ wasn't a big one in that list.

One hundred and seventy-eight.

She'd kept count, minus two or three. She always kept count.

It wasn't even a drop of water in the ocean.

Oversight was falling. The Dark Army had broken through the gates and main square and were pouring into the city center, burning, trashing and looting as they went. Luckily, the bulk of the wall garrison had been able to lock down sections of the defense palisades and had forced the enemy into a series of miniature protracted sieges. The majority of those Moles and Dragons had survived, locked down in pockets or having managed to pull back to Castle Crownhorn.

The defense garrison protecting the main square, however…

Annihilated.

Almost entirely.

One thousand and two hundred Mole warriors, wiped out to merely fifty or sixty. The entire officer corps had been wiped out, and half the survivors were no longer capable of being in combat.

The Dragon Wings had faired poorly as well.

Cyrila had taken with her almost a hundred Ices into the mountains. Less than forty had returned to the city. Less than twenty-five had made it back to the castle.

The Electric Wings serving under Volteera and a handful of sergeants had come to relieve Oversight with two hundred souls. Maybe there were fifty left.

The Oversight defensive garrison and watch had numbered somewhere between a thousand Moles and five hundred dragons, mostly Fires and Earths, like Terradora. She didn't know the exact figures with them, but judging how badly the reinforcement units had been mauled over the last few days, they couldn't have been good. Word was going around that even the entirety of Queen Lilith's Royal Guard had been slaughtered in a last stand battle against a cadre of Ogre-Orcs early in the siege. The Dragon Realms couldn't muster enough soldiers. If aid was not brought from Warfang, or Freezetail Crag, or Crestfall, or some other major settlement of dragonkind, then Oversight was going to fall.

"I'm going to get Ignitia."

"But we need you here, ma'am."

"You need more soldiers. I cannot help you on my own. I am going to find my sister, and the Purple Dragon."

"Guardian, ma'am," The Captain had begged her. "you can't leave us like this. Not here. Not _now._"

"I am not leaving you."

-But she didn't have the patience to sit and explain that.

Luckily, Terradora had a colder soul than even _Cyrila,_ and the latter was a lady of frigging ice. The dreadful looks of hopelessness cast her way had done little to impede her or weigh on her mind.

"You're going to Warfang?" Colcrus had found her on the castle grounds, nursing sword wounds slowly healing from the attentions of potions on his flanks and chest. His snout-thorn had been chipped at the tip, and he was missing the top of a horn on his crown.

"Yes, in a sense. I am not abandoning you or your fellows. We cannot win this battle without a relief army. Lady Ignitia well help me raise one, and it will march from the east." Terradora said. "I must consult the Pool. Is the throneroom unlocked?"

"It never is, according to the servants." Colcrus hushedly muttered, though she noted the relief in his voice from her specifications. "A lot of the Wings are sleeping on the floors, since we've run out of nesting. I brooded outside those doors for several nights, and there wasn't one where I didn't hear the faint, distant cries of _her._"

"The Queen?"

"Yes ma'am. She's locked in there twenty-four-seven and never leaves. The rest of the officers have basically been at the helm pretending she doesn't exist."

"Who has the keys?"

"I think his name is Razoruk. You can't miss him, he never leaves the armory in the Great County Hall, and he's missing a wing. He has orange and yellow scales, and a nasty scowl too. He never lets anyone come within a few feet of himself."

"Excuse me."

…And so, still covered in gore, soot and lacerations, Terradora spat onto the once clean palace floor as she walked through the County Hall. Nobody even glanced at her. There were makeshift medical circles set up, filled with matts for wounded dragons and dying Moles. Missing limbs, opened guts, arrows sticking from chests and joints…

She'd seen it all before.

The screaming stopped having an impact if someone could manage standing it for a year or two without respite. Problem was, most folks _couldn't._ Terradora already had.

Initially, before the invasion, the royal armories underneath Castle Crownhorn had become a center of activity as blacksmiths and artificers scrambled to produce a surplus of war material for the impending battle. There weren't factories in Oversight, not like those present in the larger cities towards the heartlands, leaving only workshops and cottages to do most of the labor. The majority of arms the Northerners were using here had come as imports.

Now, the armory was cold and empty. The forges were dark, the workstations haphazard and abandoned mid-process. The smelters were all blackened and ajar from overuse, damaged due to poor maintenance. The ingot shelves were barren, and half the sconces layering the walls were unlit or flickering to death.

Razoruk's body was almost impossible to see at first glance as she entered the tomb-like chamber. It was quieter than death. Her heavy footfalls and the rattle of the stringent armor plates covering her body echoed everywhere. Her tail's mounted mace-head bumped into a table and saw the foot cough loudly as it dragged on the stone.

The drake was mid-aged, probably a little older than her, actually. He was a head shorter, decently bulky but not fat. Atrophied muscles sat under a striped coat of orange and yellow scales, just like Colcrus had described. A brilliant, orange wing was tucked uselessly behind daggered shoulderblades, its brother missing from the joint mounted in his scapula and up. His face and his stature portrayed him as closer to the dead than the living. His blue eyes were sunken, and his cheeks shadowed. He turned sluggishly to gaze at her from where he'd been fixated on a wall.

"Razoruk." Terradora grunted. Her eyes darted down to the older drake's muscular chest. Hanging from a little chain over his neck was a silvery keyring with several keys. "That is your name, correct?"

Razoruk looked at her indifferently for a moment. Then, his one remaining wing twitched at the same time as his arm. It must've been meant as the equivalent of a shrug. It was evident that the drake had no intention of speaking, so Terradora stopped in front of him and got on with it.

"I require Crownhorn's Vision Pool to call for aid. Give me your keys."

Razoruk's eyes swiveled in their sockets back to her, and she saw his wrinkled snout twitch in a silent display of disdain.

A drop of black blood pattered on the floor as the viscera coating her scales dripped. Terradora leaned her neck down, frowning at him.

"_Give me your keys._" She repeated herself, a growl highlighting her tone.

"The Queen is not to be disturbed."

Terradora snorted.

He _sounded_ dead too. She hadn't expected him to even utter a peep.

The old dragon scowled, his sole wing twitching as he reached a shaky paw up and clasped the keyring protectively from her sight. They jingled in the ghastly silence of the empty forge.

"I will not give you my keys."

"Do you know who I am?"

"I do."

"Than your long age in this world has taught you little wisdom, if you think denying me is a good idea." Terradora stepped into his space, her breath- fouled from the exertion today –washing coldly over his snout. She bore down on him, snarling when he didn't even flinch. "I am not going to ask you again: _Give. Me. The. Keys._"

"My _long age_ has shown me nothing but a black pit." Razoruk said, unflinching beneath her intimidation tactics. "It has shown my Queen nothing but a black pit as well. If this city dies, so does she. It is not my place to interfere-"

Razoruk made a weak gagging noise as a massive claw snapped closed over his throat, constricting his airflow.

Terradora lifted him off the floor and reared back on her hind legs. She brought the weakly struggling drake closer to her face, bearing her fangs and growling like an angered dog.

"_Let me assist you._" The Guardian muttered when nothing more could be said. She reached her other paw over and snapped the little chain to ribbons off his neck, the tiny links clattering away down their bodies and to the floor. She glanced at the keyring nestled in her palm, and roughly smacked their foreheads together, making him wince. "_And yes: be afraid._"

Razoruk hacked.

She dropped him like a sack of bricks and stomped out of the armory.

When she was in the County Hall again, she faintly heard the old drake weeping behind her.

_Pathetic._

She bustled to the castle's throne room doors, a pair of grand, bronze and wood gateways sealed by a large locking cube centering the incision. They weren't even guarded. There were only a few dragons from an Electric Wing nearby. They were so exhausted that only a handful of them reacted to her presence by shooting her unconcerned glances from the floors and benches.

She had to test a few keys before she found the right one, jamming it into the lockbox and twisting. The tumbler shrieked from disuse and she shoulder-checked the door from her path, striding briskly into a normally sun-dappled hall lined with pillars on either side. The oppressive, moist atmosphere overwhelming the room immediately made her feel like she had walked into a rainforest. The western and eastern walls were overridden with colossal planter rectangles overgrown with tropical plants from across the world. Palms, fronds, colorful fruit and blue and yellow leaves created a confusing cloud that nearly grew to the arched ceiling.

Hundreds of chain-hung flower pots patterned the space above her head, water droplets occasionally dripping down to create the only weak ambiance in the chamber. Sentient hummingbirds the size of cherries flittered silently between the vast arrays of multicolored flowers, pollinating them with their straw-like beaks and also gaining themselves sustenance. They had little nests stocked with sky-blue eggs that were built into the tangles of arm-thick vines hanging from the completely overgrown ceiling's spine. As Terradora trotted forward, she sneezed when a moth as large as her fist fluttered in panic in front of her snout before vanishing into the misty gloom around her.

A faintly wet, blue carpet patterned with orange and yellow diamonds extended from the doors to the edge of a spanning, brief flight of stairs. Atop them was a throne-nest, carved from solid platinum, and decorated with roughly hewn veins of dark purple and black quartz crystal that rippled up and down every square inch of the perfectly smooth metal-like plant vines.

The Throne of Oversight though, for how beautiful and eye-catching it was, was not empty.

A lone dragoness covered in a coat of lime green scales with polished, yellow belly scutes curled in a depressive heap in the black cushions of the throne. She hid most of her lithe body under a pair of green-speckled, blood-red wings. Her brilliant crown of eight silver horns was the only thing protruding out from her bracelet-overrun forepaws as they covered her snout.

There was a large blossom tree that was growing out of a diamond-shaped, artificial rent in the floor just behind the throne. Its pink and white bushels of limbs extended high above and nearly to the ceiling. Petals fluttered down on phantom breezes, sometimes catching on the dragoness' body before weakly tumbling off to the floor.

If it wasn't becoming so dark out, sunlight would normally be streaming in from the silvery windows lining the upper portions of the throne-room's walls. The lack of this light made everything seem darker and more mysterious. A shadow had fallen over this place long before even the invasion. Terradora had never bothered to understand what it was or where it came from.

She was here to win the war, after all, not play babysitter to an illegitimate little hatchling who had a mental breakdown the moment the throne proved too overwhelming.

Terradora purposefully wiped her bloody claws on the carpet and scowled at Queen Lilith.

_Assholes of the gods…_

There was no reason to hide it by this point.

Lilith just disgusted her.

She snorted as a horrible smell only her nose could detect corrupted her air. She hadn't seen Lilith in weeks since the siege started. She'd lost weight, her scale color had paled and…

Terradora reclined again from an _actual_ smell. A rank one too that crept up on her.

…She hadn't been bathing either, apparently.

_Ancestors._

"Your highness." Terradora scornfully muttered, not even bothering to bow as she went up the carpeted steps, and skirted right past the massive arm of the throne itself. She brushed a blossom petal off her nose as she passed. "You can give these back to your groundskeeper when he decides to visit again."

Terradora threw the keyring in front of the throne with a clattering jingle, and made to go for a set of doorways behind the blossom tree.

A claw snatching onto her tail stopped her in her tracks.

She slowly formed a cruel, angry glare over her thorny wing at the perpetrator.

"If there is something in need of saying, it must wait. I have important business." Terradora said plainly. Lilith's tear-streaked, reddened face stared back at her. The green dragoness had very pretty, golden eyes. They were so puffy that it marred their beauty. But this wasn't unusual. Lilith had looked like this for a quarter of her life.

"_Razoruk_." The Queen's voice was a phantom's whisper, so weak that even a rabbit would struggle to hear it over the dripping water and the minute patter of hummingbird wings. "You _didn't._"

"…He is fine." Terradora whipped her tail, casting Lilith's dainty paw off. "Uncooperative, half-insane and rambling, but fine."

"…Good, good." Lilith swallowed, her mouth gaping as she panted like a dog. Terradora gawked at her uncomfortably. Had she been holding her breath for a long time or something? "Tell me what it is, your business. It is my court, I should know."

_You don't even know how your entire city is being butchered._

"The Vision Pool." Terradora said. "Word has come forth that the Purple Dragon and a powerful warrior have emerged in Warfang. I am contacting my sister, the Guardian of Fire, Ignitia, so she can send them to aid us."

"W-What of Solemn?"

"Cyrila sealed it, but her unit was decimated. The gates have fallen, so have a quarter of the walls and the city center itself. Nearly three-quarters of our army is either dead or wounded, and Warfang has thus far been unaware of the rapid deterioration of our situation. We are now trapped in Crownhorn and will die within the following few days unless we are relieved." Terradora darkly narrowed her eyes and started to turn back towards the tree. "Your kingdom is in shambles, your highness, all that is left to do is call someone who can fix it."

"I-I'll go with you-"

"Fret not, Queen Lilith, you are not required to do anything more than what you have been doing."

_Which is nothing._

-Of course, Terradora zipped her chops for the secondary statement.

She left Lilith to sulk on her throne, quivering and wiping at tears and hugging her tail like a lost babe.

"She would be so disappointed in me."

Terradora paused in the archframe and looked back at the Queen. Lilith was peering over the spine of her ornate throne back at her.

"Who?" The Earth Guardian disinterestedly cooed.

"My mother." Lilith snorted and wiped at her nose, shivering. "I have inherited prematurely."

"I agree." Terradora turned away.

"-W-Wait, _Terradora?_"

She huffed and stopped again.

"This happened so quickly, and days have gone by since they first came here. But do you think she is looking down on me with… _disdain?_" Lilith clawed the throne, wide-eyed. "You're a Guardian. You know matters of the spirits and Ancestors better than any dragon! Have you heard anything? _Seen_ anything?"

Terradora scoffed.

"_Matters of spirits and the Ancestors._" She parroted, before delving into the archway. Her next statement was low enough that thankfully Lilith didn't hear it. "I left all the other dumb younglings behind at the academy. Now get out of my face and let me work…"

Down a dark flight of vine-crept steps and into a funnel-chamber devoid of any clutter save a lit brazier.

There was a swirling Vision Pool centering the room, its girth filled with a spiraling surface of blue-colored liquid.

Terradora sighed as she hung her head over the brim and stared into the magical stew with a tired look.

The thought of seeing Ignitia again actually terrified her. It was because she warred to run, and Ignitia was the only other dragon who knew it. The feeling a conspirator would get whenever they encountered the one person who was aware of all their skeletons, the person who had their reputation and security entirely at their mercy every single waking moment.

The Guardian of Earth grunted and spit a green ember into the pool.

_Just do your job._

The Vision Pool flexed and a blue glow began to build around the chamber. Terradora cast a last disdainful look at the stairs behind her, straightened her wings, flicked some gore off her neck and tried to make herself look presentable.

* * *

[🐉]

Palmet had explored almost every square inch of the temple's interior with Meep loyally hanging off him the entire time. They had a little routine they'd perfected after an hour or two of disorganized rambling, occasional curses and wanton hollering, and a few spilled buckets.

Meep dusted and wiped. Palmet broomed and mopped. When in a team setting, they were quite quick and their strategies actually did pay off. Palmet- as he shined the side of a copper vase until he could he see his own ugly reflection in it –marveled at this newfound sensation of something entirely foreign to him.

_Accomplishment._

Huh.

He decided that he liked cleaning and would do it more often.

It was… how did the Fallen say it?

_Ther-a-poo-tikk,_ maybe.

It was definitely that. Therapootikk. Palmet had never lived a day in his life where things were this serenely quiet, and his only company was a cute little sewer-dredge monster who adored him, and his own thoughts. So much of the negative weight he'd carried throughout his time in the south was completely lost on him. He didn't even remember his late father anymore, or how he had always called him a bitch.

"Wha? Nah nah, we got that one already. …Huh? No! We ain't goin in any of the drags' rooms because they'd claw our right eyes out they would. Didjya see the look on Master's face when we volunteered ta clean up the washin suite in his lodgins? If looks could _kill_ I tell ya…"

"**_Meep._**" Meep chirped factually, rolling his eye as he rode on the Ape's shoulder. "**_Meep._**"

"Aw, stow that, you bloody arse-tickler. Nothin goin on with the Master and his purple-drag is any of our concern it isn't."

"**_Meep! Meep-Meep!_**"

"Yer right mad you are! Goin through Master's fings and tryin to dig up some dirt on his persona lovvums-life? You'll get us both killed suggestin mad crap like that! I know our workin relationship ain't too exstensive and all, but cheap badger-teeth in the arm, I thought you had more cunnin than that."

"**_Meep…_**"

"Yeahyeah, I know yer just yanking my leg. We Apes roughhouse verbally _and_ physically! It's good fun it is. It's why all the children who have weaker muscles and flinch a lot die out by age two. Lets the whole tribe be nice and strong, that." Palmet swaggered to a halt when they passed an archway he hadn't noticed before.

He peered down a short hallway that ended in a stairwell going down.

It took a minute for the Ape's gears to start turning.

"Aye," He mumbled, putting down his bucket. "I don't fink we got down there, did we?"

"**_Meep!_**"

"It ain't any of the drag rooms, your rite there…" Palmet hummed in thought, shrugged, and snatched up his gear before waddling inside. "Probably could use a good fluffin it could. I'z can practically smell the poor house-keeping out the door!"

Meep was like a tentacled spider as he crawled up the walls, to the ceiling, his featherdusters swishing and dabbing over every square inch of exposed stone. Palmet wet the mop and went down the entire hall with dutiful pushes. They only made a mess once when Meep fell from the ceiling from landed square over Palmet's face, locking up in panic with a fearful squeal. The Ape tripped over the bucket and sent used water spattering all over the eastern wall in a terrible crash.

After a grumbling string of vulgarity that would've made _Spyra_ blush and a trip to the washbasins with a fresh bucket, they finished the hall and stairs.

"**_Meep!_**"

"The bloody hell do ya mean there's a chamba down there too?! Aw _polly-woggles!_ I fink I just lost feelin in my hand _and_ foot on the same side of my body! I'm gonna start limpin like a halved invalid I am!"

Tiredly, Palmet dragged his cleaning equipment down the flight and joined Meep inside a chute chamber devoid of clutter, save for a lit brazier against the back wall. There was a faintly glowing, stone pool centering the room, swirling, blue light calmly coalescing from inside the funnel.

"Oi," The Ape scratched his furry head and looked around. "didjya get a sense-a déjà-voo there, Meep?"

"**_Meep?_**"

"I _have_ been stayin hydrated, thank ye much! Ya think I've been totin around all these water-buckets just to keep the mops slick?" Palmet slapped a wet mop onto the floor, grumbling and beginning to make circular strokes. "Why dontchya start with them featherdustas on the edges and walls up there, I'll take care of the bowl there and we'll-"

Suddenly, the blue light swirling inside the pool began to get brighter, and brighter, and the air rushed in a cool blast that bristled all of Palmet's fur.

Meep squeaked in terror, featherdusters flying from his grips as he leapt onto Palmet's chest and stuck there like a flung, tar-colored booger.

"-_Gah~! _Whatchya tentacles there-!" Palmet shrieked. "-_Ya just darn twisted my nip ya did-! Would you calm down alreadeh?! _This whole place is bloody packed with magical wierdum shite, it's just some normal, uneventfullness, non-harmin-"

Palmet blinked rapidly as the glowing blue light concentrated on a spot beside the pool.

There was a flash, and soon a massive, green and tan dragon that he did not know was standing in the center of the chamber. The reptile huffed and looked around impatiently, a paw scratching at what Palmet realized was mounds of caked _blood_ on its armored breast.

Terradora's eyes swept over him and Meep twice before they darted back and focused on him cleanly.

The Guardian of Earth's jaw dropped.

Palmet dropped his mop and bucket.

"…O-Oly _crap…._" He whispered, trembling.

Terradora opened her mouth and roared at him, breaking the silence and filling the whole chamber with the loud portents of her rage. She lunged off her hinds at him, teeth exposed and claws out.

Palmet shrieked like a woman and threw his hands in the air, sprinting for the stairs wildly.

"_-**Meep-~!**_"

"_Run fer ya life~! It's a fuckin enraged GHOST DRAGON-!_"

* * *

[🐉]

"-'_Use the heart of flames, mind the danger it harbors.'- _That is one of the oldest sayings on the Element of _Fire_ in recorded dragon history. It essentially explains the twofold story that every single flame you will ever see tells, whether it be a raging inferno, or the nub of a candle. The first rule of Fire is king: flames render mass to ash, for new life to be born in the ruins. Fire is nature's deadliest avatar of reincarnation and birth. It is not to be toyed with, and it is to be taken as seriously as one would manage a sharpened blade. Furthermore-"

"_Yeaaahhhh_ this is all really fascinating, this fancy-shmancy history lesson you got goin' on, but, uh… when can I start burning shit?"

Ignitia patiently sighed, gazing at Spyra past the safety guard with a masking smile. The feisty dragoness below smirked after a second, lashing her tail.

"Sup'?" She giggled.

"What is '_sup' _–is that if you wish to learn, you must listen to the information and teachings given to you." Ignitia said. Spyra frowned.

"But lectures are like the antithetical bane of everything that's actually fun."

"_Lectures_ are what will make you a true master at what you pursue, not just having _fun,_ although that should be a great part of it." Ignitia circled the outer ring slowly, Spyra rotating every now and then to keep track of her. "Your drive should be coming from the internal desire to be curious, and to evolve, and apply newly learned skills to what you already know."

"That sounds _borrrinnngggg…._" Spyra groaned. "Why don't ya' send out an army of those dummy-things you told me about, and I'll shred 'em for kicks!"

"Patience, Spyra." The Guardian came to a stop at the opposite end of the large arena dais. "Your first courses aren't going to be so _in-your-face_, as it is."

"_What? _Why not?!"

"Because, this isn't a true combat situation, and your goal here is to improve, not simply survive. Battles are an effective, if cruel and merciless learning method too, true, but they run the risk of liquefying the student every time they're met, as you are aware." Ignitia nodded for the center of the pit. "You've tempered your Fire Element above any others, seeing as you've been living with it your entire life. Using it without the knowledge of _Mana_, however, has crippled your abilities. Let's start with changing that first."

Ignitia's tail lashed, and a little paper-wrapped wad bounced into the heart of the dais before settling at Spyra's feet. It had clinked like heavy glass, she noted.

"…You gonna' tell me what that is?" Spyra quirked a brow after a moment of silence.

"Pick it up and unwrap it." Ignitia eagerly said.

"I ain't touchin' that until I know what it is."

"Whatever for?"

"I dunno', we're just delving into all this magic and voodoo shit, so that could be a mummified monkey-paw or somethin'…"

Ignitia laughed at her.

"Just pick it up and peel the paper off." She chortled. "I promise, you're quite familiar with what's inside."

Spyra grunted and snatched the item up, ripping the top of the wrappings off. She gasped and almost dropped the cleanly cut Mana Crystal nugget inside.

"You hook your students on drugs? That's muffed up." Spyra snickered.

"_Tch,_ they are not _narcotics,_ they are _Mana_ _Crystals_: utterly harmless and beneficial to any dragon who makes contact with them. They restore your Elemental energy quicker at a young age than waiting for it to naturally return to you. The Moles manufacture pickmeup nuggets like that one and distribute them as part of ration shipments. We have millions of the things sitting in the storage rooms under the residential hall here." Ignitia pointed a talon. "Just touch it and you'll absorb the gem into your body. It's just in case your Mana is running a little low before the lesson starts."

There was a flash of green light, and Spyra yipped, dropping the paper and rearing on her hinds with an excitedly intoxicated look.

"_Wooo-!_" She shrieked. "That_ is some serious shit! Ha! _You, uh… you got anymore up there?"

"Expend enough of your Mana in the lesson, and you can count on it."

"Hell yeah!"

"Let's start small." Ignitia raised a paw and gave her wrist a spin. There was a glancing arm of translucent orange that whisked in the path of her fingers. A second later, the entire chamber gave off a hollow, low-pitched _thrum. _Spyra looked around curiously. "The chamber reacts to the magicka of a Guardian." Ignitia explained. "The gems you see covering the ceiling are tapped into a hardstoned series of designated rituals and castings that are literally branded into the rock of this room. It makes lessons and difficulty curves much easier to conjure at will."

"At _will?_"

"At will, yes."

"…_Righteous._" Spyra blinked in awe. "So, like, what's first? What's _small?_ Some kind of obstacle course, or-"

"Hit the target three times in fifteen seconds or you fail." Ignitia chirped, and snapped her talons.

"-_wait wut_-"

**_Bang~! _**

The scream of what sounded like a gong made Spyra leap out of her own scales. There was a tiny burp of orange light, and a shimmering marble made of glowing ember-dust the size of her fist materialized out of thin air, bobbing much like the dragonflies back at her village used to.

"_Ho _shit!" She staggered back, cocking her head with wide-eyes at the wisp as it ran circles in the air and dipped in zig-zags, leaving a barely perceivable, pretty trail of sparkles in its wake wherever it went. "What is that thing, man?! It's wicked!"

"Ten seconds." Ignitia nonchalantly chimed.

"Waitasec, _that? _You want me to hit that little thing three times in fifteen seconds?!"

"I _wanted_ that, yes. Now it's seven seconds."

Spyra scrambled on her heels with a gasp and puckered her chops, sending a blindingly bright cone of flame whipping at the wisp.

It curved in a halo and slipped over the top of the fiery blast without making contact. Spyra tripped over her forepaws as she scrabbled to keep up with it. She cursed, her foot yanking out from under herself to send her rolling onto the floor like a meandering fool. Her followup blast of flames scorched the ground and actually backwashed into her face.

Ignitia had to suppress a snicker as Spyra hacked and flipped onto her back, her own flames harmlessly rolling off her face and kicking from her nose. It was a good thing dragons were immune to their own spice, for lack of a better expression.

"_Damn it!_"

"Three seconds."

"_Eep-!_"

The wisp just had to be mocking her as it bobbed over to the other side of the dais, swinging to and fro like a chordless pendulum. Spyra beat her wings, landed in a combat-readied sprawl in the center of the dais, and drowned the wisp in a viciously made blast of fire.

The air whooshed and the flames roared, the wisp vanishing in the center of a brilliant corona of blinding light and power.

"Time." Ignitia called over the noise.

Spyra snapped her chops shut and panted, grinning at the little veins of steam wafting off the fresh scorch mark decorating the wall and floor of the pit. The wisp had vanished, most likely consumed like the annoying, sparky little thing it had been.

"Aw yeah, baby, see that? I got it-"

"You failed the test. Let's try again."

"I told ya' that it's just in my nature to- _holdup-_" Spyra whirled around and stared at her in shocked awe. "…I… I _hit it! _Straight on! Dead-eye! _Incinerated! _I hammered that little holiday light back to hell!"

"You only managed to hit the wisp _once_ with your breath attack before time ran out." Ignitia smiled.

**_Clinkclinrink…_**

-Spyra gawked at her feet where another wrapped Mana nugget rested against her foretoes.

The poor purple dragon's eye twitched.

"This lecture wasn't as deep as some of the later ones on the standard docket, luckily for you. Not listening to it or listening to it wouldn't have affected your first trial run by much, I'll admit. But now is the time where you should begin to set precedents for yourself, young dragon." Ignitia leaned over the guard bar and hummed happily down at her. "Besides, it's rude to give your elders the cold shoulder. It's my opposing element too. Cyrila might take that with upbeatness by not I."

Spyra looked at her, and then the crystal lying on the floor. She ground her fangs and snatched it up.

"_Do that again._" She grumbled.

"Three times in fifteen seconds. _Go._"

**_Bang~!_**

The wisp darted over the first cone of flames like a loose flower petal catching a breeze. It zipped right past Spyra's nose and only caught the tail-end of a summery blast of flames.

The wisp briefly lit up white as it came outside the other side of the flame-bulge before returning to its normal amber hue.

"One." Ignitia chirped. "Six seconds."

Whooshes of fire, strings of vulgarity and claws scrabbling on stone. The wisp vanished in a whisper of air, and a fresh array of scorch marks decorated the pit.

"You've failed the test." Ignitia's stern voice echoed around the chamber calmly. "One hit."

"_What?! _Hell no, I _definitely_ hit that little mother fucker _at least twice!_" Spyra panted, her chest heaving. "_Grrrr~! Do it again!_"

**_Clinkrinknink…_**

She angrily grabbed the next tossed gem nugget and positioned herself in the center of the dais. She breathed through her nose and steadied her wings and tail.

"Ready?" Ignitia held her paw up, ready to snap her talons.

"Hit me."

**_Bang~!_**

One of the following licks of flame singed the railing right beside where the Guardian was standing. Ignitia cast the scorch on the metal a dismissive glance and reaffirmed her attention into the pit.

"Time."

The wisp flickered away, leaving Spyra to whip around frantically, like she was chasing her own tail.

"_-W-Wha'?! Where'd it go?!_"

"You ran out of time."

"_And?!_"

"One hit. You failed the test."

Spyra's fangs dug into her lower chop to the point where they threatened to draw blood. She started growling.

"No warrior was made in a day." Ignitia sighed, trying to level with her as she reached around for another gem. "You're performing better than most. The majority of students in their first trial runs can't even hit the wisp at all."

"It's too fast." Spyra snarled, tearing back and forth in a ragged pace across the dais to try and calm down. It wasn't exactly, entirely, _fully_ working… "_Damn it! _God damn it! _Bitch! _Fuck! Whorecuntedfuckingdipped shits man! _Shit!_"

"It's not a big deal, Spyra, it was your first go at the dreaded _wisp run_ as so many of the sophomores call it." Ignitia crawled over the guard and landed in the dais with her, giving a warm smile despite the strings of foul language Spyra was so well known for. "Transforming your skillset is all about repetition and constant training. You're already so close, and take it from me, I teach it after all."

"It's not fair." Spyra sneered at the floor. "I'm supposed to be the _Purple Dragon,_ and I'm gettin' my ass kicked by a rogue sparkler on steroids."

"_Everyone_ gets their asses kicked by the wisp. I certainly did when my mentor first taught me." Ignitia chuckled, sitting on her haunches before her and offering her tail. "Come here, Spyra."

"Why." She grunted, refusing to make eye contact as she pouted like a displeased hatchling.

"Because I asked nicely."

Spyra mumbled something and trotted closer, twitching when Ignitia's tail gently touched her chin and lifted her face. Ignitia hummed at her dotingly, her wings angling with content.

"…The joy I feel right now, seeing _you_ inside my training chamber." Ignitia sighed. "All the years that I thought I had failed you as well as all those other younglings, and now, here you are, with me teaching you the elements. I'm so proud of you, Spyra."

"…_Mm…_" Spyra's sour mood got a swift punch in the face, and now she was getting angry because she didn't want to _not_ feel angry at such a heartwarming compliment. She took her chin from Ignitia's tail and huffed at the floor. "I don't have time to _learn,_ I need to _do_ now."

"And you will." Ignitia comforted. "The war rages, true, but Spyra we have time and shelter. I will get you on your feet, and when my sisters return from the west, they will reinforce you with teachings of _their_ elements. The power you'll soon wield, as the only living Northerner dragon to wield all Four…"

She clicked her tongue, bending lower to nuzzle her. Spyra whined, mortified and staggered back from her.

"Quit it…"

"I'm sorry, I can't help it." Ignitia laughed heavenly. "Do you understand now, though? What it is you ask of me when you want to begin a lesson for the day? Once we begin again, this will take up _hours_ of time, sometimes days. I know how strong you are, but I need you to be ready for _this_ specifically. I need your headspace to be right, Spyra, for both our sakes. I don't want to see you fail."

Spyra rubbed one of her eyes for a few seconds, fangs exposed as she tried to deal with the ugly emotional energy stirring up hell in her chest.

Oh, how today had gone…

"C-Can we get some food now?" Spyra muttered. Ignitia beamed.

"Of course! Come with me, we-"

"-_Ghosts-~!_"

Both dragons froze when the heavy doors to the chamber swung open with a duo of thunderous crashes. Palmet collapsed on his face in the archframe, Meep catapulting like a glistening, black cannonball off his shoulders and hurtling into a nearby wall with a shrill midget's scream.

"_-Ghost drags~! Orrible, killa ghost drags-!_" Palmet ranted, rolling around.

"Aw yeah," Spyra flew out of the pit and narrowed a brow at the pathetic display. "all the cleaning chemicals musta' finally gone to his head."

"Ghosts? What in the world are you talking about?" Ignitia trotted past her, annoyance stabbing into her words. "Collect yourself! Now, tell me what happened."

"-_M-Me- a-and –M-M-M-Meep-~!_" Palmet pointed.

"**_Meep…_**" –Weakly came from the tentacled little heap nearby.

"-_c-chamber-! Big, scary and swirly pool fingie-! A-And –BOOM-! Lotsa lights and shite-! Nasty, hugggeee ghost drag came outta nowhere and tried ta eat us!_"

"…Ghost dragons… and a pool?" Ignitia put two and two together and gasped. "_The Vision Pool!_"

"That tone makes it sound bad." Spyra cringed. "Can I punish him if it turns out he broke something? Maybe swat him with a broom a few times?"

Ignitia sprinted out of the room in a cheetah's run, beelining for the partition halls breaking off from the main lobby.

"…D-Does she kno how ta fight ghosts?" Palmet heaved, holding his stomach as he lay on the floor.

"Apparently she has a superpowered tiny living fireball under her command, so hell if I know…" Spyra grumbled, following after the Guardian.

* * *

[🐉]


	31. Chapter 30 - On the Edge

**Dragon(s)layer**

**30**

* * *

**On the Edge**

* * *

"Reminds you of a lot, doesn't it? The sun goes down, the streets get lit up like a forest of Christmas trees, and everything feels so serene. It's your favorite feeling. You've stayed in places where you get that sensation of intrigue, and you've sometimes refused to leave. What was the longest you stayed put? It was awhile ago…"

_Ale,_ the waiter had said it was. The Fallen called bullshit: this stuff was burning up a storm like it was made of motor-oil.

At least- he understood as he took another sip –it didn't taste like _piss_ too. Bad drink was a topic killer.

He sighed over the neck of the glass and poked at his food on the table. Big dragon forks. They were weird in his fingers, but not unworkable.

"I don't remember."

"Eh, me neither. It wasn't important, but I just thought I'd bring it up. …Say, we're still good for that appointment we talked about, right?" Conscience drummed his fingers as he stared out over the eatery balcony at the array of city lights below.

Sconce lanterns lining streets, window torches and brazier breaks were the sources of all those amber bulges in the dark. If you didn't squint, you could fool yourself into thinking this world had electricity.

"You never give me a choice no matter what I say. I can't believe I haven't completely lost my mind."

"The first sign of insanity is: _talking to yourself,_ expecting an answer, and _getting one!_"

"Now you're rubbing dirt in it."

"Just a friendly reminder, and nothing more, my good _good_ friend who I conveniently share the same skull with. _Oh,_ and, uh, in other mental news… you miss her. Like, really _really_ badly miss her, and it hasn't even been a day! Oh-ho man! If she stays pissed indefinitely… Dayum', you're screwed."

"Go trip over that guardrail and die in a bloody smear." The Fallen kicked back his head and drained his glass. "Make the view just a bit prettier for me."

"Aw, c'mon _Fallen,_ I'm your Conscience! I don't die, unless _you_ die too." Conscience chuckled, making him growl into his cup. "Are you still thinking about that after all this time?"

"You would know."

"I wanna' hear it from you."

"Of course I am."

"Well quit it. Nothing's getting fixed if you punch a dickhead's ticket out this early in. You still have to get your tools of destruction back, win over Spyra again, find that Orc that messed up your face and break his neck… Jesus, the to-do list is bigger than that dragon-eating horror's ass back at those misty islands. You almost stayed there too."

"…Why do you have to remind me of every single bad thing that's happened? Can't you ever just show up and do something nice? How about expending even a quarter of all that energy focusing on the good things I've done."

"I'm only a carbon copy of what _you_ choose to see." Conscience laughed in good humor.

"_You're_ only the most exhausting foe I've ever faced." The Fallen scowled down into his cup. "…Damn it, I thought this was made for _dragons,_ and I'm not even feeling buzzed yet."

"You could try mixing drinks! …Oh, don't look at me like that, I'm only kidding. _Anyway,_ staying on subject-"

"I'm supposed to be having dinner."

"-Well they aren't coming back for a few more minutes! So I have you all to myself, sir. I'll make it quick, and then you can get back to your interdimensional double-dinner-date. Let me start out by saying this: I _know_ you're thinking about it, for obvious reasons. I know you're thinking about Cynder too."

"Oh, can we please not…" The Fallen sulked preemptively.

"Well isn't that why you've become so fixated on her? You share so many ideas." Conscience chuckled in a strange moment of doting seriousness. "Driving towards your own goals whilst trapped inside a larger machine you don't completely agree with? Seeing things that would make anyone want to end it all, and just struggling with that every day for no particular reason other than to survive? C'mon, Fallen, Cynder's a lock-and-key fit for you, so is Spyra. Two emotionally damaged dragonesses desperately lonely and seeking a male's touch? Holy hell, the pot of puss-gold you literally landed on."

The Fallen gripped his cup so tightly that it threatened to shatter. Conscience took his feet away from where he'd been resting them on the lattice table and sighed.

"Alright, I'll let you have the view for the last few seconds. Here they come."

"I know, I _know_. Just please leave me alone."

"Look on the bright side: tomorrow? Oh, the toys those Moles are gonna' have ready for you." Conscience patted him on the shoulder and clicked his tongue. "You should feel like you're getting a brand new car or something!"

The Fallen guffawed.

Bigger guns always came with bigger problems. Though, getting to fight with the proper equipment and not the dragged-up dregs of a beggar sounded most appetizing. If there was one thing he could state in firm confidence to anyone, it was that Ape equipment was abysmal.

_And evidently, so is Warfangian ale. A toddler could slam a few of these…_

He peered at where Conscience had been sitting, grumbled and nursed his mug.

He actually didn't remember when he had first started talking to himself. Well… he _sort of _did. It was all blurry, just like when he had jumped through his first portal.

Old memories like that were dusty scabs in the very rear of his mind. Unused, unneeded and very distant. Being able to recall stuff like that after all this time was impossible.

Just like the face of the first person he'd ever killed.

Everyone said you couldn't forget.

The Fallen called bullshit on that too. Everyone who had ever said that had committed the act of killing within _mortal_ parameters. Ones, twos, threes, maybe even tens, maybe even a rare hundred. Most people never reached _thousands._

He was probably at that point by now.

But then again, he didn't remember that either. _That_ felt dirty. Not memorizing your first victim. Even psychopaths had a code of honor with that it seemed.

_Where's the off switch?_

The Fallen examined the lights of Warfang. Spanning domes now catching the amber glow of the city and reflecting it as massive spheres of yellowed silver. The moons were full, only strung by occasional black clouds.

It was such a beautiful place, this realm…

And yet that still didn't make the ghosts go away, and nothing ever would.

"Now _that_ is a cheeky nice view." Morinth said with her mouth full as she hopped back into the chair Conscience had vacated. "This place has one of the greatest vantage points on the west side of Warfang. See that? Even over the walls too! All those grasslands look like a black ocean from here."

"We used to sit up here a lot, w-when we first got out of the academy." Taliopia had been slowly peeling away layers of awkward social anxiety the whole time. The Fallen's dampened mood was lightened a bit at seeing how much progress she'd made. It felt like he was talking to a completely different dragon than the timid little thing he'd found in the swamps. "Sometimes we didn't even have dinner, but we would talk for a long time." Taliopia shyly laughed.

"It was just to watch the hours go by with my Tali'…" Morinth nuzzled at her from across the table and shoved another roasted strip in her mouth. "-Humans are carnivorous I see." She pointed out after swallowing.

"Omnivorous." The Fallen nonchalantly said, grinning a little as he peered down at the empty array of bones on his plate. "I just prefer meat."

"Most fighters do. It's morosely intriguing: being so fond of meat when our jobs are literally to cut people open and see theirs." Morinth stared at one of the little steak cuts on her platter for a second, before wing-shrugging and popping it in her mouth with a large barbed fork. "It must be a predator's senses coming on outside the borders. It's a fine line to walk, which I'm certain you know already, to not let it _come home_ so to speak?"

"_Very_ fine." He put his empty cup down, tracing the golden glare of the city lights as they traveled down Morinth's black face, highlighting her onyx scales and the tiny curves of her cheekbones and snout. Her pretty emerald eyes met his and she giggled. "Very fine indeed."

"Cheap flattery doesn't work on me, remember?" She smiled.

"It's hard to remember when I look at either of you."

Morinth beamed at him for a while, and then, her gaze flickered over his shoulder, and her expression soured.

"What?" He asked.

"Speaking of _remembering…_" She nodded subtly and kept her nose down to her plate. The Fallen bristled in a second of unsureness before recalling himself.

They had company. Basically state-assigned stalkers, if anyone had ever heard of such a thing…

He craned around to look at a table placed just between the reach of the moonlight from above and the darkened shade provided by the eatery's upstairs interior section.

Rava looked white in the colorless hue of the night, and Windshear looked pale blue. His eyes weren't on them at all: he was too busy gawking at the view and pointing out things for Rava with his wingtip. Rava, contradictorily, couldn't stop glancing at them past the bridge of her snout.

The poor dragoness looked like she was about to jump out of her seat with the way her eyes kept landing on Morinth and Taliopia and skimming over him. The Fallen knew that look. He had no doubts that the Electric hen was desperate for some closure, and she wanted to get it by apologizing to the two dragons at his table.

_Not my problem._

Windshear noticed him staring, and waved a paw briefly before ignoring them again. Rava was now full-on locked in his gaze, unblinking.

Huh.

One was a dragon who had seen some shit and drowned in hubris, and the other was an emotional hypochondriac.

Interesting combo, if his first-impressions turned out to be accurate.

"I could earn a medal for how well I made her invisible." Morinth chuckled. "I was the wall for awhile, not that I would complain. Someone as good as Taliopia needs a friend, always, even if I wasn't around to be it."

"Can you tell us more about these other worlds you've been to?" Taliopia nudged him with her tail and broke him from his thoughts. "Do they have doctors there too? Like me?"

"A lot of them aren't much different from this one. There's cities, forests, oceans, _dragons_ in some cases too. And yes, there are doctors." He said, giving a passing glance at the tiny amount of customers sitting about the balcony aside from the two soldiers who were staring at him.

It may not have been every day that an alien sat down for dinner at a nearby table, but, come on, this was just being rude…

"Yesyes, you've spoken about your travels so much, but I want to hear about _you._" Morinth leaned over the table. "Why not give me and Tali' an exclusive look at the Fallen, the _real_ Fallen, like you did with-"

Taliopia coughed and Morinth shoved a steak abruptly in her face mid-sentence.

"-_Go aheb._" –She muffled, gesturing with a wing. She swallowed. "We're both very curious about you."

"We've been since we met you at the temple." Taliopia shyly said. "Nobody's ever made us feel the way you do, especially no males."

"And you both don't seem to mind that my spear hungers for variety." He saluted them quietly and snapped his fingers for a passing waiter, holding up his empty mug. "_That_ I can appreciate greatly. Normally I end up with very angry reptiles who proceed to ruin the local tri-state-area in fits of hormonal rage."

"Normally we would, but…" Morinth looked hazy for a second, her eyes glazing. She slapped her chops and coughed, shaking herself like a dog fresh out of water. The silverware jingled on the table. "-_uhm… n-not with you._ You're different."

"What did some of these other people do to you?" Taliopia lightly chewed, picking at steak strips like a bird. "Were they dragons?"

"Some of them." He shrugged. "It's really all a hybrid of politics, economics, tactics, and personal time. The trick is finding ways to juggle them all and make everyone happy."

"And you've figured that out?" Morinth teasingly raised a brow.

"Not at all." He chuckled, thanking the waiter when a fresh cup slid onto the table. The little Mole had gotten a smidge more comfortable leaning past the Fallen's flank after two or three passes. Some of the patrons weren't even paying him any mind anymore.

"So tell us a story of something that happened." Taliopia suggested, her tail wagging.

"…Uh…" He cringed at his own reflection in the ale. It sucked but he couldn't stop drinking it. "…W-Well, one of them reacted pretty poorly and decided to go with the more projectile option. She threw me."

"As in… onto the _ground?_" Morinth rolled her mug.

"No: through a glacier's wall." He flashed a grin. "It hurt like fuck all too. But I survived."

"…_Wow…_" A piece of food slid out of Taliopia's mouth.

"Other than that, you know everything. I'm a Portaljumper. I jump between worlds. I help some people, hurt some too, try to restore order where I can as best I can, and pursue adventure." He toyed with his fingers in his lap. "I was sent here against my will, but now that I know so much about this place…"

"Do you really have to _leave_, like Spyra said?" Taliopia asked. "You're just fighting in the war to get home?"

"There is no home. I'm nomadic." He shrugged. "…Well, _partially_ nomadic. I take my home with me."

"_Now_ this is capital and interesting." Morinth toyed with his legs under the table with her tail. "_Teelllll usssss~…._"

"…I really shouldn't-"

The Fallen glared at the guard rail. Conscience was standing there, blackened as all the city lights behind him made him stark in the night. He shook his head and gave a thumbs up.

_It's fine, stop worrying._

"…Though, I guess... it makes good conversation." The Fallen blurted out. "I haven't even told Spyra a lot about me. I haven't had enough time."

"So tell _us_ first." Taliopia giddily smiled, bouncing a bit in her chair and making the iron creak. "We won't tell anyone if you don't want us to."

"Tell us about this equipment you lost. More of those injector-needle-thingies? Like the one you saved me with?" asked Morinth.

"There's probably more of those, yes, but what I really need is the power source that's located in the spine of my epidermis internal skeleton, just between the sublayer gel and the reinforced, banded hardplate that keeps out any-"

The Fallen paused mid-sentence and noticed the two dragonesses staring at him. They looked like he had started speaking another language.

"…I have a suit that makes a lot of these problems go away. It has a power core inside the back that allows me to do things I normally can't if I don't have it on." He simplified.

"Like what?" Morinth asked. "I find that hard to believe, seeing so much of what you've done already just in that suit-sleeve of yours…"

"No, this isn't…" The Fallen pinched the jumpsuit and shook his head. "-this isn't anything. My real suit, my armored suit that goes on top of this, is where the really cool stuff is. It has weapons inside it, tools I can use to get to people really far away, cross vast distances, even fly."

"How can you fly without wings?" Taliopia felt up his back as she chewed.

"I'll show you when I find it." He said. "The suit's one of the most important pieces I need, but there are other things. You remember that empty pistol I've been carrying around? I have another one, a _better_ one of unique design."

"A champion's gun?" Morinth teased. "Like the Mole Flintlock weapons? But one-handed like the Orc Archers we fight sometimes?"

"Similar."

"What about for fist-fighting?" Taliopia sounded nervous again, on the subject of close combat, she always looked like she was about to wet herself. "D-Do you have a magic sword?"

"Nah," He grunted. "I hit people with a toilet implement."

Morinth burst out laughing and punched the table, earning some concerned glances. Taliopia started giggling.

The Fallen had a very serious look on his face for a moment before shrugging.

"Laugh it up, girls, just wait until I have that baby back in my hands…"

"-_Aha-! Oh, _oh I don't doubt it." Morinth calmed down. "Sword, glaive… hell willing: I could see you jumping out of one of those alien-pods holding a _stick_, and I would be terrified if I was an Ape."

"You beat up the bad guys with a stick?" Taliopia gazed in wonder. "…_That's so… _weird,_ but… but cool…_"

"It's kind of like a stick. I'll show you. When I find it, you'll see." The Fallen leaned over and stole a strip from Morinth with a quick swipe of his fork, making both dragonesses giggle. "Who knows, I might even find it all _tomorrow,_ or the day after, or…"

* * *

[🐉]

"-was where my father worked with both my uncles. There was a time, not so far away, when I was staked for _carpentry._ Believe it. I joined the academy just to get away from them. Too cluttered it was." Windshear chuckled, sitting back and downing more of his wine. "Life's interesting like that. Looking through a window for years, having a plan, and then something happens and this window you've had for decades doesn't make sense anymore, sometimes on the dot within a second. Crazy shit."

"…What do you think they're talking about?"

Windshear coughed on his drink and smothered himself with a napkin.

" _-W-What?_"

Rava folded her forepaws on the table and stared at the three of them across the eatery. The human, with his arms gesturing and fingers flexing. Morinth and Taliopia, raptly listening to him and bursting out into sporadic episodes of laughter between pauses of dumbfounded fascination.

Windshear followed her gaze and sighed.

"I don't know what the Council is so worried about, he looks fine." The drake shrugged. "Haven't they been paranoid? When the walls fell that one time, back during the first invasion, it must've flipped a switch. Suddenly everyone's calling their own bluff and chasing leads of espionage that don't exist."

"…I have my suspicions." Rava spat, her brows daggering as a few sparks of electricity danced down her talons. Windshear smiled and glanced between the little light show and her face.

"What's the matter?" He grinned like an asshole.

"The alien makes me nervous is all. Have you ever seen anything like him before?"

"I've been far and wide, but I have yet to encounter a skinless chimp until today." Windshear edged his mandible and squinted at the Fallen's back for a second. "…Kinda' reminds me of a _Cheetah._"

"He doesn't look anything like a Cheetah! There's nothing feline about him. He's squishy looking, and _thin._ Like a charcoal stick. How can something so weak looking have so much gall behind it? You don't seriously believe all that shit the others are blabbing about, do you?"

"Cynder could've been done in by a pencil man." Windshear shrugged. "I assume naught of that which I havn't witnessed."

"…Marelsy, verse five on part two."

"Damn it, you've gotten good. I can't even whip up play quotes anymore." He laughed. "Honestly, that alien could be the best thing that's happened to us. He did bring the Purple Dragon safely through the south, and if he's as good as they're saying, he'll make a fine addition to the ranks. They're thinning and I don't like it."

"I don't like anything that's been going on, Windshear. Life is too stuffy in this city, and I feel like I'm withering." Rava sighed. "…And besides, Morinth and Taliopia are the last two dragons I haven't had the chance to apologize to yet. For the old days."

"Nobody cares about that stuff. You're torturing yourself." He sipped on his wine. "When they leave, are we tailing?"

"Fuck it, I can waste my leave-hours more pleasantly. I think you're right: the alien's as much a security threat as a pantry mouse." Rava slid out of her chair and gave Taliopia one last mourning look. "…_Damn it. _Anyway, are you coming?"

"No way, I wanna' finish my wine."

"Lush." Rava winked and unfurled her wings. "Barracks tomorrow?"

"Yep."

She took off with a rush of wind. Windshear doted on his wine and narrowed his eyes at the human's back.

He didn't exactly feel threatened by him, no…

But there was too much mystery in that soup for him to let his guard down. He found himself taking the guard duty more seriously than Rava was.

* * *

[🐉]

"-the city is about to fall, and we are staked to die."

"Stop _saying it like that._"

"…I only speak facts, sister, no matter how hard they are to accept."

"I am not lying down and _accepting_ that you are to be slaughtered!"

"I believe you. You've been screaming every sentence for the last ten minutes. "

"What? _No I haven't-!_ I-I'm sorry_. _What about Volteera? A-And Cyrila?"

"_Cynder_." Terradora spat her name like it was a foul taste on her tongue, a talon lifting to point at scabbing laceration wounds across her chest and flanks. "She took them. Both of the units under their command fractured and the Dark Army is inside the city. Urukal's Orcs are going to spearhead a charge into the castle come tomorrow morning. I don't have enough men to stop them."

Ignitia gave off a sound that was a strange hybrid of a gasp and a knowing sigh. She slumped in front of the Vision Pool and buried her face in a claw.

"…It really is true then." Terradora's dark face suddenly lit up as she looked at the stairwell behind Ignitia. "The Purple Dragon has been found."

"…So, uh…" Spyra trotted into the chamber quietly, eyes wide and locked on the titanic Earth Guardian. "…I'm taking that you ain't really a _ghost._"

"And I'm taking that there is a reason an _Ape_ is loose inside the temple." Terradora flickered her gaze between the two of them, somehow appearing more regal despite the caking gore, mud and the wounds she was ignoring.

"He is in servitude to the Fallen." Ignitia mumbled, letting her talons slide off her face. She gestured to Spyra. "Spyra, this is Terradora, Guardian of Earth. Terradora, Spyra."

"It is an hon-"

"Ya' know, at first glance, I thought you were a dude."

Terradora's chops clapped shut and she blinked. Spyra sat down and gestured to her own mouth.

"…it's the _jaw._ It's really, like… _square._ And all those thorns and rocky scale-things jutting out of your shoulders are something I'd expect to see on like, _Terrador_, not with an _a_ on the end and-"

"Spyra, that's enough." Ignitia quickly laid a paw on her shoulder. She smiled sheepishly at the other Guardian. "…All students are students no matter the scale color!" She chirped cheerily. "She's still learning, fresh into this world and all…"

Terradora's stoic soldiery attitude shattered as a deep flush invaded her snout. She put her nose up and grunted a '_Hmph!_' –in retort.

"One's definition of _beautiful_ is another's of _mundane._"

"Nah, not mundane, you look sick! But _dude-sick. _You got the legs for it, though, and the chest, we just need to chisel some of them muscle chords off the neck and-"

"_Spyra!_" Ignitia snapped. "I said enough!"

"A-Are we done nitpicking my appearance?" Terradora fought the blush, snarling. She glared once at Spyra and snorted. Evidently, the Purple Dragon of legend _sucked_ at first impressions. "We need liberation _now,_ Ignitia. You must raise an army and attack from the east. The enemy has left their rear lines vulnerable because of the push inside the city. If you hit them now, you can end this."

"With _what_ army?" Ignitia said. "All the legions are either fighting in Avalar, holding the coast against Infernia or are trying to push into the mountains near the Iron Wastes. Warfang is practically empty, minus the city guard."

Terradora's eyes fell on Spyra.

Ignitia gasped.

"_No._" She placed herself between her and the pool. "No, that is not an option. We haven't even started her training, and she hasn't mastered any other elements!"

"Ignitia-"

"_No!_ Are you forgetting _who_ is besieging you, Terradora? We are speaking of _Urukal,_ Legionary Commander of a quarter of Malefora's Orc armies. He's the one who broke through Avalar during the last invasion, scaled the walls of Warfang, sacked the Mid-Districts..." Ignitia and Terradora both experienced a minute jolt in their spines, but it showed more in the prior than the latter. Ignitia's red face went pale as ugly memories swam around in her mind. "…I will not let Spyra go head-to-head with a foe like that, not yet."

"_Hey! _Subject matter here! Not even a foot away!" Spyra galloped around Ignitia's flank and propped herself up proudly between the two Guardians. "If I could take on the Apes, I can beat some smelly-ass _Orc_ and his band of ragtag shitstains. I held my own against Visigoth! I-"

Spyra faltered.

_Until the Fallen saved me._

"-I-I can handle myself."

"So _Spyra_ is your name." Terradora huffed, expression unreadable as she peered down at the smaller wyrm. "I'm to believe _you_, a youngling, faced off against the infamous Chieftain Visigoth and lived?"

"Her _and_ the warrior who fell from the sky." Ignitia chimed. "Spyra and the Fallen killed Visigoth and destroyed his entire tribe inside the Forlorn Watch. I-I'm not doubting Spyra's capabilities, especially not after what I've seen. But Urukal and his Orc legions… they are an entire level above the disorganized warbands the Apes operate in."

"So you've spilled much Ape blood." Terradora sized Spyra up, snorting when the purple beastess grinned at her cockily. "What solutions lack at the time cannot hold priority. She isn't perfect, Ignitia, but she is the _Purple Dragon._ If nothing else, the morale boost will be exponential to the soldiers."

"She will have to fight on the front lines!" Ignitia cried.

"I will be her chaperone. At all times. She will not leave my sight."

"Can I get a word in edgewise here or-" Spyra raised a talon.

"She _isn't_ going and that is final." Ignitia stomped her foot, her tail slinging over Spyra's chest protectively, and yanking the feisty 'ness back until she was snug between the Guardian's slender forepaws.

"-_Hey-!_" Spyra squealed.

Terradora opened her mouth, exposing her fangs as she filled her mighty lungs with air and made to explode in her friend's face-

-But some kind of otherworldly restraint strangled away her unbridled rage a second later.

It was impressive, to witness Terradora's expertly trained demeanor firsthand as the Earth Guardian slew her temper and returned to the debate completely composed. Spyra was a little jealous.

"_Ignitia,_" She said deeply. "I understand the attachment you had-"

"This isn't about that."

"-_with her egg,_ but your judgment is clouded, at best, right now, and what's more-"

"_This isn't about that!_"

"-you are being _selfish._"

Ignitia shriveled back mid-shout. Spyra produced a plush squeak as the Fire Guardian absentmindedly squished her into her breast, kneading the poor dragoness like she was some kind of comforting teddy-bear. Terradora's eyes flashed between the two of them for a moment, before she deflated with a sigh, her mace-capped tail whipping once.

"This is not an easy decision for you to make, and I _see_ that." She couldn't bring herself to use the word _understand._ Because she didn't. It was weak. She didn't have any attachment to this Purple Dragon outside of her status as a living symbol.

Obviously, her bond-sister's thoughts on her were _much_ much different. Terradora wasn't like Volteera. She couldn't deal with this touchy-feely bullshit and not come out of the exchange with a virulent need to puke.

Still, for diplomacy's sake, she kept her cool, not only for that reason, but also because it was _Ignitia_ she was talking to. She was possibly the only hen in the whole world who she had a modicum of respect for.

"Desperate measures are afoot. Oversight is done for if _someone_ doesn't show up." Terradora nodded at Spyra. "Your Purple Dragon can obviously fight. How well? That remains to be seen. But she _will_ fight at her best with me as her mentor. I will pull her and any reinforcements with her through. That I can promise."

"…Doesn't sound like too bad a deal." Spyra muttered from Ignitia's arms. "Besides, then I actually have the chance to do something! I can fight the _real_ war for the first time!"

Ignitia drummed her talons on top of her head as she mentally began to cycle through all kinds of excuses and alternatives. Spyra growled and swatted at her like an angry cat in the meantime.

"W-What if I sent you someone else."

Terradora cocked a brow.

"Someone _else?_"

"Y-Yes, someone better."

Spyra stopped struggling, mumbling something under her breath. The words '_better'_ and '_fuck' _rolled out a few times.

"The warrior who fell from the sky and brought her to me at the Dragon Temple." Ignitia nodded. "The _Fallen._ You don't need an army, Terradora, I can send you _him._ He'll break your siege!"

"A single warrior? One who isn't even a _dragon?_" Terradora cracked the first legitimate smile in probably years, shaking her head at what she was hearing. "Do not be ridiculous. No single fighter can turn the tide of a battle without an army behind her. This _Fallen_ isn't even a drake. What is he? Some fleshy insect-person? Or maybe a hunk of sentient ground meat?"

"He is _human,_ and I have witnessed him slaughter entire battalions of Apes by himself." Ignitia let Spyra go and stepped closer to Terradora's projection. "Sometimes, he even did it unarmed."

"Hmph." Terradora frowned. "Are you certain you were not just blinded by _my_ memory, hm?"

"He is a ferocious fighter. In fact, I would even go so far as to say he is positively _vicious._ I have not seen such a grotesque art of killing since… since…" Ignitia twiddled her talons sheepishly. "…well, since _you._"

The Earth Guardian's stance became erect and her wings preened.

"_Me?_" She stammered, that royal red flush returning with vengeance. "You think this little meatbag is comparable to _me?_"

"He is, one of the best." Ignitia turned to Spyra. "Tell her what you saw, Spyra. Tell her about the Fallen!"

"…H-He's-" Spyra swallowed, coughing as anger slipped into her chest. "…h-he can do it. God damn it, I don't even wanna' _admit it,_ but yeah, that guy can do it. He can break that siege."

"_Siege?_"

All three dragons turned to look at the stairwell.

The Fallen was standing there, a tired look on his face, arms wrapped around a cloth-sealed bundle-box of leftovers he hadn't been able to finish off at the eatery.

"You want me to break a _siege_ tomorrow?" He gawked at them, then noticed Terradora, and almost dropped his food. "Holy crap, is that Harad's sister or something?"

"T-Terradora, t-this is-" Ignitia stammered.

"_That's_ him?" Terradora gasped, cocking her head, as if the Fallen was a child's science experiment that had gone horribly askew and had made a mess on the floor. He looked like a fucking twig. Oh no. Oh _no_ this had to be a joke. "This has to be some kind of a joke."

The Fallen pursed his lips.

"Thank you so much for your hearty confidence." He grunted. "So, you're Terradora?"

"I am." The Earth Guardian crinkled her nose, giving a disapproving run-down from his face to his feet. "And what are _you?_ Some kind of cross-breed between an Ape and a sloth?"

"Oh-_ho._" The Fallen smiled widely, utterly fixated on the large, drab colored 'ness as he stepped into the chamber. "A sloth and an _Ape._ I haven't heard that one before. That's unique. I'm so glad you took the time to provide me with such instructive feedback. So, can I ask you a serious question? Did your parents purposefully have sex with the intent to create a set of woman's legs with a man's face and neck, or did that happen because your mother was actually born with a dick, before she changed her gender like a disgruntled tree-frog?"

Ignitia's jaw dropped.

Spyra tried to hold it in.

She _desperately _tried.

She tried and tried, just because she was so pissed at him, and hated his guts, and didn't want to laugh at his jocular madness that she had resonated so much with.

But god damn it.

Her frown quivered like the surface of a pond hit with a stone.

She snickered loudly and collapsed on her haunches, rocking as she swallowed a bout of hysterics that threatened to shoot fire out her nose. These strange, muffled laughs started to bounce around the room…

"_-M-hm-! M-hm-! M-HM-!_"

-She hiccupped and fell on her side, rolling in apparent agony on the floor as she wrenched her eyes shut.

Terradora had the expression of a lion who had just smelt blood and was a centimeter away from its intended prey.

Even the Fallen had to pause a second.

Holy shit, when this baby girl got angry, you fuckin' _knew it._

How adorable.

"I-If you send that _thing_ here." Terradora quivered. "Don't expect it to come back. Because I'm going to _kill it _with all these other Dark dregs_._"

"Nono, all seriousness aside," The Fallen held up a hand, smiling politely at her as she stepped beside Ignitia. "-I would be honored to liberate your finely sculpted, bootylicious backside from the risk of destruction."

Spyra sputtered and shot to her feet, mouth agape in angry awe. Terradora flushed even harder.

"I haven't broken a siege in _months._ This should be a really exciting exercise. I'll watch over Spyra, and we can slay a bunch of bad-guys together. Sounds fun, right, babe'?"

* * *

[🐉]

Obviously, the Fallen spent his first night in the temple by himself.

Interestingly, Ignitia had failed to inform Terradora that it was her lodgings the Fallen was living in for the time. It was probably a wise decision, given how easy it was to get on the Earth Guardian's bad side, apparently.

He shivered when he remembered the death glare Terradora had given him through the projection before she had whisked away after Ignitia's promise. He had no shame in admitting that Terradora was sexy as hell when she was angry. That stare might've chilled the blood of a normal person…

It just gave _him_ a boner.

"…I see the two of you had a disagreement." Ignitia quietly said as she walked him to Terrad-_his_ room. "May I ask what happened?"

"I have some lifestyle choices Spyra hasn't gotten used to yet." He shrugged miserably.

"_Yet?_"

"She'll be back."

"…_Right._ How was your dinner with Morinth and Taliopia?"

"I have a suspicion that they really like me."

The campus looked like the city at night. Dark, with hundreds of light speckles all over, like a field of grounded lightning bugs waiting to take off.

"Where is she staying?" He asked as he sat on the rim of the nesting sheets.

"I've lent my chambers to her for the night, until she decides what she wants to do tomorrow." Ignitia sighed, sitting in the doorframe and glancing around the room. "...I'll take Cyrila's nest. She wouldn't mind."

"Sounds good." The Fallen yanked a cover over himself and stared at her for a minute.

There was silence.

She… wasn't leaving.

"…Was there something on your mind, Ignitia?" He sat up.

"_Oh! _No, no. No, not at all…" The fake grin slipped away and her wings drooped. "…_Yes. _S-Spyra. Spyra can't go tomorrow. She _can't._"

"It's not my decision to make." The Fallen folded his arms in his lap and sighed, staring at the pair of candles lighting the chamber up on Terradora's rock-collection shelves. "I can't believe that she'll pass up the opportunity to go. Honestly, Ignitia, I wouldn't worry so much about her. I worried before I dragged her into her first real battle, and, I mean, _look._ Spyra has the right kind of mindset for this occupation. She can handle the pressure, she's quick on her feet and she's a hell of a lot smarter than any enemy soldiers she'll encounter. And she can deal with _killing._ It takes a special sort of mind to do that."

"I know." Ignitia breathed. "I know that she's strong, and capable, more capable than any student who first walked into these halls I've ever seen. But I don't want to lose her again. I… I _can't_ lose her again. Not so soon…"

He got out of the nest and crossed the room.

"I will not let anything happen to her tomorrow." He reached down and slipped one of Ignitia's paws into his hands. The Guardian jumped a little and stared at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. The Fallen rubbed with his thumbs. "I promise."

The fire dragoness flexed her jaw a few times, sheepishly looked down at their feet and scrambled a sentence she had wanted to say into incomprehensible little noises.

"_Goodnight_-_" _

She tore from his grasp and practically sprinted down to Cyrila's room.

The Fallen sighed and made to close the door.

"-_Aye,_ there ya are, Master! Goodn day I was hopin for ya." Palmet waddled by, bucket in hand, Meep peering over his shoulder. "I'm the new cleana man accordin to the nice drag-lady! Ain't ya proud of me, boss?"

The Fallen glanced back at his empty nesting, the hands he'd held Ignitia's paw in, and growled.

"Fuck off, butler."

Then he slammed the door shut.

* * *

[🐉]

Ignitia's nesting was too fucking warm, even for her.

And the room was so red, that someone could've torn open an artery, spattered blood all over the floor, and it still would've looked drab in comparison.

She'd settled for curling up in a ball without all the upper blankets, staring at the curtains obscuring the room's window.

She was still so angry.

And she was excited too.

A siege.

She'd never seen anything like that before. Obviously, most people could say similar. She wasn't as afraid as she should've been. Fighting was her outlet, after all. Ripping a few Grublin faces off sounded like an excellent therapeutic practice…

_Grublins, Orcs…_

Monsters she'd only ever heard stories about. Not Apes. _Tougher_ than Apes.

She stretched in the nesting like a cat and rolled onto her back, eyes lazily tracing about the crimson-colored ceiling in the dark.

Angry angry angry…

Betraying bastard.

That _dick._

It was all his fault that she was like this.

And Morinth and Taliopia and Cynder's fault.

Fuck 'em all.

She ran a paw through the blankets and sighed. Somehow, the nest still felt empty. It was bad enough that she considered tearing down the Fallen's door and throwing herself at him.

Did she really want to admit it?

She rolled over again with a growl and shoved a cushion into her face, snarling in it with a muffled drag.

Deep down inside, after seeing the Fallen for what he really did, who he really was…

…there was part of her that didn't care.

* * *

[🐉]

"Wake up."

She felt it ironic that the first thing she experienced was a chilling shiver up her back.

Cold was supposed to be her master work, after all. It had never been so far from her talons in terms of control…

But then again, _everything _had been out of her control the last few days.

"_Tch._ I fail to understand your reason for stalling. Is it just to annoy me? _Fine,_ if I admit that it's working, will that get your ego up enough so we can proceed?"

_Oh Ancestors_ her head hurt.

Like, it _really_ fucking hurt.

It pulsed and ached, like she'd slammed it against a castle's wall repeatedly. Her face was puffy, and she couldn't open her eye. One of her paws was wrong too. It was uneven. Something loosely rolled underneath her flesh when she tried to move her wrist.

The cold stab came back with fury.

She winced and twitched.

Cynder noticed with a pleased hum.

"I knew from your heartbeat that you were still alive anyway, but it is lovely to see you moving after the strain I put you through. I'd apologize, and yet…" The black dragoness chuckled, and her voice spun a slow, lazy circle around her in the dark. Something gripped her by the collar and hoisted her up.

Cyrila winced as she felt Cynder's cool, minty breath wash over her face.

"_I'm not sorry~._" Cynder giggled before roughly shoving her back onto the ground. "_Oh,_ good times we've had. But where was I…"

Cyrila coughed as metal clinked and some sort of luminous buzz consistently echoed in her hearing. She tried to move her arm.

**_ShWNK-!_**

She grunted.

A solid chain's link yanked taught to impede her.

"…_what are you doing to me this time…?_" Cyrila wetly mumbled like it was all an inconvenience. She coughed again as she sat up with difficulty and blinked her one useful eye a few times to clear it.

A spanning, glacier chamber met her in force.

It was colossal, with a domed roof stuffed with icicle blades sharp enough to run a dragon through from end to end. The walls were beautiful and reflective blues mixed with the drab grays of cold stone. The actual cavity itself was big enough to hold a whole town.

Moving shapes in the air caught her attention as she tried to make sense of everything. Cyrila went wide-eyed and swallowed when she saw a blocky object bobbing in the air just a brief walk away from where she was laying.

It was a platform, made from the stone structure of an ancient, gray, frost-crusted castle. Its belly was jagged with earth and ice, like it had been plucked from the ground and tossed into the air like a balloon.

It was levitating.

Behind it were the shattered remains of a Gothic tower, arched with windows and embattlements. It levitated too, on an island of ice the size of a house.

The whole chamber was speckled up and down with the floating, fractured signs of a colossal structure that had been splintered like a pane of glass. Suspended towers, chunks of a bailey with networks of open-aired chambers exposed like the guts of a carcass. There were incomplete bridges that only half-bracketed the gaps between the pieces of the maze.

She and Cynder were on an icy loft platform ringed with fractured pillars and the remains of walls. There was a giant tunnel with light at the end of it to the west, more islands bobbing like black stars in the glare.

_Wait a minute…_

"…_Ugh, why would you-…_" Cyrila winced when she tried to scrunch her pained nose. "…_ouch._"

"Don't try to talk too much, Cyrila, I might have fractured your skull, you know." Cynder hummed, more chainlinks clattering loudly.

_"_Was the faceplant into the rocks necessary? I can't feel my head."

"I suppose you could've come quietly." Cynder shrugged expressionlessly as she rolled her arm around another chainlink, wrapping it through a banded, black-iron band sticking from the face of a snow-dusted pedestal. She yanked hard, compressing Cyrila's leg to the pedestal floor. The Ice Dragoness grunted. "But you're the Guardian with an ego to outdo the other three. You surrendering is like snow touching the sun for gods' sake. I wasn't about to land and ask you nicely with a proffered cup of tea."

"That would have been quite the sight…" Cyrila mumbled, angling her snout down to look at herself. "…What are you doing?"

"Just finishing up…"

Cynder had her chained to the cracked remains of a pedestal. The bands sealing the chains into the soil past the edges glowed a dull blackish-blue, and they gave off that annoying buzz she was hearing. They were obviously enchanted. With what, she didn't know. But it was doubtless that it was meant to keep her from using her powers to escape.

"Oh, the bands are branded with the essence of Shadow Gems." Cynder politely pointed out when she noticed her staring. "I have a whole collection of the things lying around back home. It's quite easy to crack one open, bleed the Mana into a solvent and process it through a chant unto an object. Waste not want not, yes? Your Ice Element is completely drained and will remain so until the bands are removed, or you expire."

"You've never attempted to-" Cyrila gagged and spat blood onto the ground. "-_capture_ us like this before…"

"I've never had a reason to enact a plan like this before." Cynder sighed, stepping back and preening her snout about the setup approvingly to check her work. "You all have made my life exuberantly difficult since the day I hatched. I don't expect any of you to just up and pass me by on the eve of such a reckoning."

"You've finally lost your wits, haven't you?" Cyrila sourly laughed. "Bringing me _here_ isn't going to keep my allies from coming after me. Haven't you heard? The _Purple Dragon_ has been found, Cynder, and I highly doubt they're just going to sit back and watch as you kidnap a Guardian of the Elements. But how could you not know? I thought this dragon gave you a fair spanking due south…"

"If I spin the argument and start prodding at _your_ pride, I guarantee I can have you shedding tears of fury in but a second." Cynder smiled, twirling around with extra gait in her hips and stalking away. "Look at where you are, Cyrila. You don't think I know how poetic it is that I should slowly peel you strip by strip to death in this place?"

Cynder pointed with her tailblade to the other side of the chamber. Cyrila quivered angrily as she glanced to follow.

Behind a floating, scythed-in-two castle was a tunnelway almost completely sealed in luminescent, icy blue crystal. A waterfall cascaded in a distant whisper over its lower lip and vanished into the blackened depths that awaited any who fell from the floating ruins of the platform they were on.

Cynder smiled sadistically at her.

"I'm going to make you _beg_ for me to kill you right in front of the tombs of your entire family, _and_ your people."

"_When I get out of these chains, I am going to make you suffer~!_" Cyrila exploded, the chains jingling as she wreathed and wiggled and writhed against their might. She tried to swipe her tail only to find that it too was wrapped up in a link and nailed to the ground with a fifth band. A sixth wrapping of chains constricted around her body like a rope, pinning her wings. "_You can't keep me in here forever!_"

"No, not forever." Cynder returned with a more grim expression. Her tail curled over her flank, wrapped around an item that was colored a dull, reflective gray. "Look at it."

Cyrila stopped struggling and looked at the object, her breathing getting louder and heavier.

"…_Cynder,_" Cyrila whispered. "_do you even know what you can cause with such a thing?_"

"I'm well aware and have no need for your two-gems."

The black dragoness stepped over to the front of the pedestal, and gingerly slipped the colorless, quartz-looking crystal into a bowl-shaped slot bulging from the edge of the metal just ahead of Cyrila's nose. The Ice Dragoness shrieked and redoubled her struggle against the chains. She opened her mouth and tried to blast Cynder with a cone of frost. All that came out was a ragged, supernatural hiss and a tiny wisp of white air.

Cyrila slumped, defeated.

"Don't worry, I've been told the process is rather painless." Cynder muttered, twirling her talons around with a few muttered magical words. The gem flickered white, and the staccato buzz overtaking the air redoubled in volume. "It's what I'm going to do to you _afterward _that you should be afraid of."

Cyrila moaned as the chainlinks sealing her to the ground began to glow white. She teetered and landed in a sprawl, her tongue dribbling out of her mouth, her eyes becoming heavy as illuminated rivulets of raw life-force began to flow out of her body, down the chains, and into the pedestal.

The platform pulsed eerily and the gem began to become filled gradually with a blue-colored tinge, like a bottle slowly being brimmed with fresh milk.

"If by chance the Purple Dragoness _does_ show her face, keep her busy long enough so I can arrive." Cynder muttered offhand as she trotted away. A towering, white-furred Ape of her Cold Legion grunted. "And if the _Fallen_ is with her, restrain him, but keep him alive. I'll kill your entire battalion by peeling their flesh off if you fail in that regard."

She turned her snout to the floating ruins around them.

Ghostly looking.

If only she had time to stay and study them. Getting rid of the guardian monsters had been trouble enough to warrant such rewards…

Though, she supposed using _charms_ was in a sense cheating.

"If the dragon proves too much for your men, pull as many back as you can and regroup to the rally point. Let my dead cousins have a go at her, I'm sure they'll prove adequate."

Cynder smiled and glanced at Cyrila.

The Guardian- even though she was slowly dying –was able to gather enough energy to inhale sharply and blink in terror.

The ground thudded underneath the tread of heavy footfalls. Masses of hollow collagen rattled like a roomful of children's toys. Great limbs lurched like tree trunks, and the unholy hiss of foul breath meandered into the air.

Cyrila scrunched her eyes shut and screamed defiantly.

Cynder started laughing.

* * *

[🐉]

The Fallen had been right in assuming the Moles as competent blacksmiths. Their metalworking was artistic. They could manipulate raw ore like wet clay: hammering golden plates onto hardened skeletons of steel, trimming beautiful designs from edges of brass no thicker than a fingernail.

Bangs, hisses, screeches from the forges and the murmur of trained teams. The air stank like brimstone and oil and was muggy to the point of being unbearable to any not used to it.

"It was a tall order. It took up half our stations. We're held up by almost fifteen-hundred items of quota in exchange for maybe ten or twenty pieces? And I thought I heard it all before Starbrun said it would all be worth it…"

"He actually said that?"

"Moreso hopefully than with resolve I'd reckon."

The Fallen glistened with sweat as the foreman took him from forge to forge, smelter aisle to smelter aisle. Rivers of molten metal illuminated them orange and flashes from hammers meeting birthing-blades flickering everything white with each shrill strike.

"Your measurements are a little different than what we're used to, but I think we made do, and to expectations. We didn't go too flashy with it. The fittings could be tweaked and the gorget was mishandled and needs to be completely redone."

"How long until all the kinks can be buffed out?" The human wiped his brow.

"Gimme' and my boys another three hours?" The Mole adjusted his smock as they neared a heavy iron-topped table on the edge of the forgehouse. "Feast your eyes on the blood and sweat made pretty in the meantime. The breastplate's my own work. Look but don't touch. We're still buffing and priming."

Starbrun had not been lying about the quality of Castle Wyrm's underworld staff.

It was a suit of armor, and it was beautiful.

While the majority of the girth glistened a dull silver, all the trims and edges were colored brass and gold. The breastplate was a two-piece linkage sealed via ring-suspended hook-belts. The chesting was flat and sloped, but was emblazoned with a thinly sculpted sigil of the city of Warfang above a forwards perspective of a snarling dragonshead that actually formed the shape of the belly extension. Golden edged scalemail was to be wrapped protectively around the stomach, the arms and legs and the interior thighs.

Branching wing-shaped pauldrons matched a triangular gorget that was chiseled to resemble layered plates of draconic neck-scales. Greaves made in likeness to screaming wyrm skulls protected his legs and fit snugly with a pair of bulky, bowl-like kneeplates that were scythed cleanly down the forward face for the tail-shaped shinguards that curled around his lower legs like vines. There were cleated boots layered with bronze edging on a stacked hill of plates going up each ankle. The rear cuirass was ridged to mimic a dragon's spine scutes up and down the back. Protective hip skirts of thick scale-plates draped from circular seals that each had a reflective bulge of perfectly polished copper as irises, so clean that they looked like spheres of pure amber.

Finally, an open-faced helmet designed to leave the wearer's head within the fanged maw of a drake topped the suit. It was nimble, and relatively lightweight. Though the Fallen took some time to adjust to the feeling of armor on himself again. It had been so long since he'd adorned an older variation than what he was used to.

After the suit came a gladius styled shortblade with a length colored pure gold from a hilt carved into the visage of three interconnecting oak leaves studded with a pair of tiny rubies. The handle was wrapped and supple crimson hide studded with gold rivets. It came with a sheathe of red leather banded with steel cuffs and a belt whose lock was a flat dragon's face.

"This one took longer on account of the length." The foreman gestured to another of the tables. "Ours are a bit shorter on account of the, uh…" He craned his neck back to look up at the underside of the Fallen's chin. "-…the height difference."

A shortened glaive-hybrid with its own custom sheathe adhered via twin looping belt seals over the cuirass. The longarm itself was the same as the gladius, speckled gold from all the divet buttons. The ring just below the golden blade had a pure sapphire enclosed in its leftwards face. A thin, finger's thick spine of pure platinum anchored the blade itself in a tentacle-like sprawl that linked directly to the haft. It was the length of two _human men's_ arms. Not too large for it to be a dedicated weapon, not too short for it to not perform the way he needed it to.

"When you're handling her, mind the weight difference at the head, all the special ores we mixed in with the usual setup might not make it easy for a first time us-"

The Fallen removed the glaive hybrid from the table soundlessly and twirled the elongated weapon between his fingers, windmilling thrice before catching the length in both hands, he vaulted on a heel and graced the blade in a wide swing, followed by a pair of dicing cuts and a singular thrust aimed for throat-level.

The foreman blinked.

"…You made your point, no need to be flashy."

"And the last two orders?" The Fallen breathed, steadying the fresh butt on the floor by his hip and leaning on the hybrid testingly.

"Those took some doing. You better not lose them…"

"Your weapons don't die unless I die."

"Two chambered revolving forearm shot, pin-secured right beside the hammer-mechanism, fair stopping power, though we thought the kickback from one paw was a little catastrophic-"

"How catastrophic are we talking about?"

"The last fellow who test-fired her ate his own fist."

"Beautiful."

"-Walnut stock and spin detailing, steel-capped at both ends here and here, the grip's reinforced with smooth leather and the trigger's straightened, to avoid finger-hooking. This certainly isn't one of our standard Flintlocks…"

"Can you cock it?" The Fallen put down his glaive and carefully manhandled the gun. It looked like an oversized pistol, but according to the Moles, it was actually set to the standard of a rifle. Almost like a sawed-off. But it wasn't a slugger.

Interesting…

"Release latches there and there." The foreman hopped on his little feet to point.

The Fallen pinched and the whole front of the weapon's body cocked forward and revealed the innards held underneath the ironsights spine. A heavy double-round revolver feed colored gold and silver. The foreman handed him a pair of fat, coppery shell casings.

"The barrel was too big for a timer, so we added a thumb-latch by the safety keeper here. Give that a click and the lock here should kick it right around to the second feed port."

"Why only a two-shot?" The Fallen slid the rounds in, his hand sliding over the weapon cleanly to lock, click and yank the hammer. He aimed it at a passing cluster of forgeworkers who yipped in fright.

"Oi, Flintlock rifles only have one!"

"…Oh. Right."

Wrong time period to be a chooser.

It was hard to remember sometimes.

"This ammunition looks like it'll hurt." He cocked it again and jittered a shell free to hold it in his palm. The thing was bigger than his thumb.

"You could blow a hole in an Orc the size of my head if it performs the way we think it will." The foreman pointed across the forge to a larger weapons station where Moles were riveting together heavy, metal-plated wheels meant to be mounted on what looked like cannon carriages. "Normally these here rounds end up in the chain magazines for the gatling guns. We have enough of them lying around, that we thought you'd appreciate the extra firepower."

"I'd kiss you if you weren't a rodent." The Fallen glanced from the gun to him. "…And a dude."

"Uhhuh." The foreman grumbled. "The last thing is for your own protection. Give it a try."

An arm-sleaved shield, not wide at all, thin and long, thick enough to stop the blade of a sword or an axe, nimble and bolt-plated in the center, so that it could bend with the Fallen's elbow joint.

"The weight from this sleeve will play havoc with your swordarm, you know that?" The foreman shook his head as he watched the human clip all the belts in place.

"It isn't for my swordarm." The Fallen cocked and flipped the gun in the same hand and brandished the two pieces, outstretched with an eye pinched shut. "…God _damn_ I look cool."

"Good to see our output disaster earned us a happy customer." The foreman rolled his eyes, pointing at the gun. "Fitted?"

"The grip needs to be back a little more, but I'll manage. You boys didn't do too shabby." He winked.

"From such high appraisal I see."

_You have no idea, my furry little friend…_

"I think I'm going to call this baby a _Handcannon._" The Fallen slipped the firearm into a loose pouch on the hipplates. One last glance about himself proved to him everything was in order. He smiled as he slipped on his brand new, shiny helmet. "I'm off to kill shit and save some Guardians. Wish me luck."

* * *

[🐉]

Ignitia was shaking the whole morning. She hadn't slept at all last night. All she could think about was Cyrila, and Volteera, and wherever they were, and whatever Cynder was doing to them.

Poor Bilou had tried to offer her tea when she had left the temple, and she had snapped at him and shooed him away quite angrily. A pair of students were arguing under one of the campus trees, and she'd physically grabbed both of them to stop the scene.

Ignitia closed her eyes and tried to take a deep breath.

She'd already had a period in her life where she'd screamed at everyone around her for reasons not of their own fault. She couldn't afford to slip into that again.

"You both look like hell." Starbrun grumbled. "That's alright, I haven't slept much either..."

Ignitia looked at Spyra beside herself, blinking when she noted that the purple dragon appeared almost identically to her. She was shivering a little, glistened with sweat, and she had bloodshot eyes…

"Are you alright, Spyra?" Ignitia blinked again at the sound of her own voice. She sounded like the living dead.

"I'm just dandy…" Spyra refused to meet her gaze and rolled a fist into one of her eyes, growling when a sleep-crusty escaped her efforts.

"You didn't sleep?"

"I slept fine."

Spyra warded off any further quizzing by turning away from her to groom one of her wings and nibble the joint.

Like hell if she was telling Ignitia that the fucking nightmares had come back, and that she'd woken up in the middle night, screaming, in a cold sweat. That wasn't her business. Just like her spat with the Fallen.

"Ignitia," Starbrun stepped closer to her, his voice lowering to a whisper. "at least let me send a few Wings with you."

"You have no Wings to spare, Councilor." Ignitia smiled. "Trust me, the stories you have heard about Spyra? About the Fallen? I am quite safe with them as my companions."

"Traveling without an army is foolish." Captain Harad snorted, his heated gaze turned out to the rest of Immortal Square as the city center sprawled around them, bathed pink from the first rising morning sun above. "If it is true that we have already lost _two_ Guardians, I hardly see what will be gained by losing a third…"

"_Pfft,_ ya' know, 'cause we're all a bunch of intoxicated retards, right, Hackjaw?" Spyra rolled her eyes.

"It has nothing to do with that! We have security forces here in Warfang! Ma'am, you are too valuable an asset to utilize in some half-assed strike operation, especially one against an entire _army._ Do you really think three souls are going to make a difference in this battle?" Harad snapped, his thorny wings preening. "And that you have ordered me down is just another fact in all of this that is simply _insulting._"

"Calm down, Harrier, or you'll pop a gasket." The Fallen gave off little metallic **_chk_**'s as he stepped over to them from across the square. Spyra went to glance at him with disinterest, but found herself locked into a stare when she saw what he was wearing.

Holy shit.

Golden and silver scalemail and plate, a wicked helmet, a fat pistoleer gun and a sword on his hips, a two-handed weapon slung over his back…

The Fallen stepped in front of her and grinned down at her sheepishly.

"_O-Oh my…_" Ignitia stepped back, flushed, her thick tail twitching behind her as she sized the Fallen up. "…Starbrun, you must have pulled some heavy strings to make him look this… this _serious._"

"Desperation causes strange things." Starbrun pawed the cobblestone and glanced around the mostly empty square. He paused for a moment before saying: "I dreamed of days where the Purple Dragon would come back, and I would send them off on missions I knew no one else could do. I wanted so badly to be the Councilman blessed to be alive when that time came. Now, I'm standing here, at that moment, in the flesh, and I'm hesitating." He smiled sadly at Ignitia. "Ancestors above, I wish it wasn't _you_. You are like a sister to me."

Ignitia bowed her head.

"I cannot abandon the other Guardians, Starbrun. There is no one else we have right now. The Fallen and Spyra will keep me safe, and I to them."

"They had better."

The Fallen sighed, but he was understanding of it. Starbrun growled that last bit entirely focused on _him_ and no one else.

"I request to join the party bound for Oversight." Harad chimed for probably the fifth or sixth time since they had all gathered out here. He glared defiantly at Starbrun and Ignitia. "It is my job to protect the Guardian."

"Infernia's harrying the southeast, Captain." Starbrun said. "I've already assigned you command of a Wing there. You are needed. We appreciate your dedication, your loyalty, but it is simply not to be."

Harad shut his mouth when it began to quiver open. With an enraged snarl, he tore away, his wings unfurling and giving off a leathery flap. He soon vanished in the pink and purple morning sky.

"I feel kinda' bad for Haggrid." The Fallen shook his head, glancing at Spyra. "He's always so angry about something."

"Tell me about it. Guy's got a chronic case of draconic-brand constipation, and I ain't got time for tha-"

Spyra clapped a paw over her mouth.

"_No! _Bad! You don't get to talk to me! Not like that!" She snapped, flapping her wings and scrambling away from him. "You are in the _banished corner!_"

He bit his lip and quietly accepted this.

"So when are we leaving?"

Starbrun just sighed.

"Come on, up-up." Ignitia lowered a knee and nodded for her back. The Fallen jogged over, tenderly placing his over the Guardian's slender back. She shivered. "-I-I assure you, the weight isn't too much…"

"Just tell me if I poke something by accident or…" He awkwardly sat down and adjusted around, wincing when Ignitia grunted and stood back to her full height.

"_Pfft,_ brutha', if you poke anything on her, it sure as shit wouldn't be by _accident…_" Spyra growled under her breath, unfurling her wings and giving them a preparatory beat. "Let's just get this shindig in the air and kick some ass."

"I would follow Terradora's instructions to the dot." Starbrun called as he backed away from them. "Approach from the east. Get behind the Dark Army's lines."

"We'll discuss the plan more on the way." Ignitia nodded, rolling her shoulders and asking over her wing: "Are you settled, Fallen?"

"Of course I am." He gave her a thumbs up. "Riding on the back of a bombshell 'ness such as yourself? I'm the envy of this damned city right now."

Spyra actually shot up into the air _in flames._ There was a whoosh, a scream and a blast, and the purple dragoness was soaring west wreathed in comet-fire.

Starbrun gawked, mouth ajar.

"Oops." The Fallen cringed. Ignitia took off, and soon, the city of Warfang was passing underneath them again, except this time, it was _shrinking. _"I have the feeling that we're in for a long day." He called over the breeze.

"I believe you." Ignitia zipped over the massive city walls and began to glide over one of the immense grasslands surrounding Warfang. It resembled a sea of azure in the morning gloom. The Fallen couldn't help but stare. "Fallen, w-we need to save them… my sisters."

"We will." He laid a mailed hand on her neck. She didn't just shiver from the cold of the metal. "We will."

* * *

[🐉]


	32. Chapter 31 - Spyra vs Ignitia

**Dragon(s)layer**

**31**

* * *

**Spyra vs Ignitia**

* * *

Manhandling the new equipment was troublesome while in the air, so the Fallen tried to wait until Spyra and Ignitia had one of their 'Flight-Breaks' every few miles to play around with his new rig.

Taking the Handcannon apart and putting it back together was the trickiest bit. Its makeup wasn't just old, it was _unique,_ a kind of setup that came from a world that hadn't adopted what would've passed as more traditional firearms technology across the greater Multiverse. He had handled Muskets, Bolt and Lever action rifles and even Blunderbusses…

The Moles had elements of their firearms that actually skipped some of that advancement bridge, but lacked in other parts. Brass casings were appreciable, lightyears ahead of some of the other locally slapped together crap he'd worked with in the past. The manual revolving feed was a chore, but he would make do. It was offset a lot by the thumb-latch sticking out the Handcannon's side like a little golden thorn. The sights were pretty solid. The weight was bothersome, but again, not catastrophic…

All in all, the unique tell-tale signs of yet another separately developing reality.

The scale of what he understood some days was overwhelming. But that didn't mean he couldn't wish he had his normal gear…

"I haven't ever seen the engineers pack so much into such a tiny package." Ignitia commented, taking a sip out of the waterskin hanging off her hipsash belt. "A lot of confidence is being placed in you, what with custom outfittings, and such respectable weapons."

"Starbrun's a greater drake to put aside everything that happened. I don't intend to disappoint." He glanced at her as he proceeded to take apart the gun once again, laying the parts with zealous care onto the face of a boulder jutting out from all the grass. "How are you feeling? You look exhausted."

"Was it so easy to tell." Ignitia sarcastically laughed. "You have fought in wars before."

"Many."

"So you understand what it feels like to… to lose people."

"Unfortunately, yes." He frowned, laying the last piece of the Handcannon out before pausing, and then beginning the reassembly process. He liked the way the metals clicked together. A good gun snapping back into a whole was a calming activity between the storms for him. Though, it was good only in a sense in that it _looked_ good. He still had yet to baptize it.

"I want to believe that they're still alive." Ignitia clenched her jaw. "Why else would Cynder capture them if not for something they could only provide in life?"

"I know you're scared-"

"I'm _terrified._"

"…I know. But the only way you're going to get through today is by detaching yourself from them. That sounds horrible, yes," He held up a hand when she shot a cold glare at him. "but combat is hindered by exterior weight. If you're too busy drowning in fear, you won't see that errant axe coming for your head until it's too late."

"We both are soldiers, Fallen." Ignitia huffed. She hopped on top of one of the hundreds of boulders creating the greater rockfields around them and surveyed the area. Gigantic, empty grasslands and sparse woods were to the north, shorthanded hills dotted with spheroid trees and an old, rotting mill tower lurked in the south. "Just ahead of the forests there is Southern Avalar. It's sealed mostly from this portion of the Dragon Realms by foothills and a series of river rapids. We are in the middle of nowhere right now, putting it kindly."

"Was that amusement I detected?" He smirked.

"A little." She giggled. "This is where several of my best students come from. Out here, in the villages and draconic keeps that grid the landscape outside the walls of the major cities. Everydragon thinks its quality of amenities that determines the quality of the warrior."

"I'm a country kind of guy myself." He twirled the Handcannon trigger-wise around his finger and caught it mid-cock with a metallic **_ch-chkk! _**"They're still alive, Ignitia, and we're going to find and get them back. I promise."

"You can't promise that... nobody can." She hopped off the rock and trotted towards him, a sad smile blossoming up her snout. She clenched her jaw when it threatened to quiver. "But thank you."

"I promised Spyra I would get her back to her folks, and that I'd get her to Warfang, _and_ that I'd stop Cynder. If I can keep a loaded trunk of keeps like that, hell…" He sleaved the gun and nodded at some boulders. "Let me know when you're all rested up and ready to go. I'm off to practice."

"You seem skilled with these sorts of arms to begin with, what's it going to do for you, hmm?" She was joking, but she still startled the Fallen by stepping ever closer, and summarily running a paw down the silver metal of his arm-shield. Her talons hissed against the armor quietly, and she met his gaze shyly. "Or do you really just fancy boasting that much? You're so worried about my worrying: what about the risk you give yourself from your cockiness?"

"I can't help wanting to impress."

Ignitia flushed when he took up her claw and laid his other gauntlet across her breast. He stroked up to her neck, and took her chin with his finger. The Guardian suddenly appeared mesmerized, amber eyes widened as her heartbeat picked up. She could feel the unnatural energies coursing from him as they flooded her veins.

"I know Spyra's a little offhanded by… well, the whole _egg-thing_ between the two of you." He noted quietly. Ignitia deflated like a wilting flower for a moment. "But that'll never change who she is to you. And, it leaves you open in the market so-to-speak. There are always other folks out there who will be willing to be your little hatchling, including those of the extraterrestrial and dashingly posh variety."

**_Fwooof~!_**

Ignitia's wings preened, creaking like opened sails. She was blushing so hard that she appeared the color of vibrant blood in the sun. The Fallen smirked and slid his hands off her as he walked away, leaving her trembling with butterflies storming in her belly.

"I'll look for Spyra too while I'm at it. She's probably wandering around, setting something on fire… or cursing at a tree."

The Fallen frowned as he hopped over the rough terrain and ducked around a cluster of dry ferns. The sun was luckily shielded by many gray clouds, so the rays weren't heating him up in his armor yet. Still, this bloody thing weighed a lot and it was stuffy. He peeled off several portions as he found a nice clearing ringed by rockland to spar with himself, leaving the plating in a pile in the grass as he unsheathed his new gladius, and began to practice strikes and parries.

His swordsmanship was a little rusty. He hadn't fought with a handled blade of such quality in a long time. His normal melee apparatus was more bluntly-styled and much more powerful, and the auxiliary blade in his suit was wrist-mounted. Roman-style slashing hadn't been part of the menu for a while.

Mid-swipe, a rush of air caught his attention.

The Fallen steadied himself and perked, noticing an amber flash spark out behind some boulders nearby. Scratching the beginnings of stubble on his chin, he tossed his gladius in the pile and started trudging over.

Only one thing that could be…

"_-Fuck-!_" Spyra barked. "-_Come back here you little-_"

Another rush of whipping flames.

The Fallen peeked around a rockpile and blinked when he saw the purple dragoness lunging all over the place at seemingly nothing. Every time she hit the ground, she'd scramble back up, breathe a cone of fire, scream a string of curses, and leap again.

What the hell was she doing?

"-_Damn it-!_"

"Spyra, are you alrigh-"

The Fallen screamed girlishly when a broiling sphere of fiery death flew in his direction straight for his face. The air cindered as he threw himself away, and the fireball slammed into a boulder with a crack of burning force.

He looked up and saw that a virulent flush had invaded the reptile's face. Evidently, she hadn't expected him to show up for her.

"…D-Did I hit you, Fallen?" Spyra started to sound concerned. He felt his heart sink when her tone immediately became blanketed in a sour undertone of disinterest. "…Mm, actually, you look a'ight to me. Those mad-reflexes of yours saved ya' as _usual_." She ground her fangs and turned away from him, snarling at something hovering over her horns. "…I certainly didn't hit _you,_ you little powdery asshole…"

The Fallen gawked as he stood up.

It was a moth, flapping its most likely singed wings in panic as it made a break for a nearby line of foliage. Spyra growled and pawed the grass, casting him a momentary and angry glare as she allowed her impromptu prey to escape.

"Nothin' to see here, man, just me me _me…_" She mumbled.

"What are you doing?" He asked.

"Missing. Just like at the Guardian Temple." Spyra trotted around him. "Is Ignitia ready to go yet? We're never gonna' get there in time if her old wings keep giving out from elder-cramps or whatever the fuck she deals with everyday…"

"Her demons are less physical, I think." He rubbed the back of his head and followed behind her as he checked himself for scorchmarks. "Is there a reason you've turned to murdering moths?"

"I'm…" Her intent to snap at him faltered. She had to think for a second. "…_training._"

"Uhhhhhh-"

"_It's a test! _At the Temple of the Guardians! There's this- this –_evil fireball thingie! _And it zips around like a motherfucker, and it's impossible to hit and-" Spyra shook her head and smacked her tail off a rock. "You wouldn't care about it."

"Actually, I would. Very much." He jogged to put himself beside her. "How did your first training sessions go?"

"Terrible."

"Why?"

"Because they were terrible."

"…Alright, so… _why?_"

"Because _I'm_ terrible, just- would you leave me alone? How many times do I gotta say it, man? You're in _purgatory _right now, so sod off." Spyra tried to walk away faster, nearly bounding. "If it isn't enough that I gotta' worry about this siege, and that I failed a toddler's level test in what is supposed to be the primer for my entire destiny, _now_ I gotta' deal with _you._"

"Me, huh?"

"_You!_ You hareming, interdimensional, portal-leaping-"

"-jumping."

"-_Portal-**jumping** schmuck!" _

Metal clanked and he rocked on his heels. Spyra was on her hinds and had her forepaws pinned on his chest, her snarl giving off wisping trails of soot as she leaned close and growled.

"Go on." She said lowly. "Try to crawl back to me. It's something you would do."

"Only because you're too important to me to lose." He laid his hands tentatively ontop of her claws. "Ignitia's still got a little while before we take off again. Would you want to just… sit down near some boulders, and… _talk?_"

Spyra tore her gaze from him, her chops curling in all these weird angles as her mind tried to force her to scream at him, and her heart to throw herself.

"It can be about anything you want." He cupped her shoulders, making her flinch. "Or, it can be about nothing. We could just sit. Last night felt… _empty_ without you in the nest too."

"Why not go sleep with the green-eyed half-breed, and her pet, nurse-dike?" She pouted.

"'Cause you're my special spoon-durg."

Spyra looked like she choked as she suppressed a giggling snicker, forcing a frown and turning her snout up at him.

"I-I am no longer your _spoon-durg._" Her brow twitched. The Fallen smiled, pressing the assault. "And besides, I'm the _Purple Dragon,_ I deserve _my own_ harem all-things-considered. A chamber of hung-like-titans drakes with nice wingspans and sprawling chest muscles…"

"Mmmyeah, you could go with that, but none of them would have the glorious, ultra-powered goodness that is my penile blade of destruction." He winked. "If you want, I could make last night up to you, by… maybe… taking you behind those trees, bending you over a rock, and plowing you until your eyes cross?"

Spyra's eyes didn't cross (yet) but they sure as shit looked like glass as her gaze immediately snapped back to him.

She swallowed, sweat fleeing down her scaly brow as he burrowed into her with his usual stupid grin and fast-mouthed pickup lines.

_No. Resist. You can do it, girl…_

"I-I can think of better pastimes in a _senior home._" She sneered. "_Hospice wing._"

"You wanna' see if we can write our names in the cum-puddle afterwards?"

Spyra jolted in his arms and her mouth was sucked dry.

"N-N-_Never._" She stammered, but it really didn't come out forcefully at all, more like a pathetic squeak. Her body began to catch fire in a metaphorical sense. The dragon hadn't been aware of the tingling in her groin two seconds ago, or the itch in the base of her tail, or the undying need to growl….

He leaned forward and put his nose in the crook of her neck, sniffing quietly and sighing in content. Spyra gasped as a purr began to thrum in her throat.

"That girly dragon soap the Guardians use is right up your alley." He said. "You smell like flowers. It's pretty sexy."

Spyra's left eye faced in a different direction.

The Fallen muffled a surprised grunt when her chops suctioned over his lips. Somehow, against all things improbable, Spyra's face had transformed into a vacuum cleaner, and it was threatening to tear his jaw out.

His arms immediately slung under her wings, and he carried her to the ground before splaying her roughly in the grass. Spyra gave a pained moan and her tail lashed around his ankle. The Fallen started to undo belts and yank straps off, the last vestiges of his brand new armor being hurled away piece by piece. He stripped everything below the cuirass except his boots.

He grabbed her hips, hoisted her up, and yanked on the base of her tail, like it was a lever. She moaned again and her legs flew open on reaction. Flesh squelched as he dipped a hand low, gritting his teeth as he worked her.

"-_I knew you'd come around._" He breathed.

"-_This doesn't- _Ah-! _–change- _OooHhhhh-~ **_anything._**" She snarled. "_It might just be the outside air gettin' to me, but don't think this means I forgive you! Y-You hear me? I hate you!_"

The Fallen entered her with a wet pop. She batted her wings into the grass and reared her head back, crying out as he began to piston into her like a rabid animal, not even giving her time to prepare.

"-_Y-You _h-_heard-_m-m_-me -Oh!- r-right?!_"

"_I heard you._"

"_I hate you! I-I h-hate-_y-_youuuuuohhhhhancestorssss….~" _Her eyes crossed and her tongue hung out, each thrust jolting her and causing her head to bob. "_Just s-shoot it all inside me…_"

"_Mmf. Inside._"

"-_d-damn it-! Fuck! Breed your dragon bitch, y-you man-whore-! Breed her-!_ Ooooooooohhhh-_cuminsideme-cuminsideme-CUMINSIDEME-!_"

* * *

{🐉}

Ignitia honest to the Ancestors thought she was about to eat her own leg.

Riding down from the rush of what had happened only gave her a taste of free-thought to consider how she felt. The unbelievable sensations of whatever kind of poisons radiated off the Fallen's skin had completely decimated her, and so now, she was pacing through the rocks and grass a shivering wreck, trying to ride down the crash of her high like a drug addict.

She knew that this wasn't normal behavior. She _knew_ something about the Fallen was doing this to her.

But as time went on, she also knew that she no longer cared.

Aggravated firstly over what was happening to her, Ignitia found her temperamentally further stoked when she realized she was also angry because the human was out of her reach.

Acting like a hormonal youngling, the Guardian snarled and spat fire everywhere, venting her frustrations on rocks and grass, and transforming her surroundings into a veritable hellscape of scorchmarks and burnt vegetation.

"_Ancestors damn me!_" She howled, slamming her face into a boulder and sliding her forehead down the burnt surface. She grit her teeth and snatched her eyes shut. "_No wonder Spyra went outside the species… t-this is… he's…_"

"Oh my god, are you alright?" The Fallen gasped.

Ignitia tore away from the stone with a frightened yip, her tail curling behind her as she stood in a surprised sprawl.

The Fallen was walking with a bit of a limp as he glanced around at all the destruction and came to stand before her. He was dusted with dirt and his armor was grimy, plus, he was wincing and trying to rub at his pelvis through the harness.

"A-Are _you_ alright?" Ignitia peered at him.

"_None_ of us are okay, _okay?!_" Spyra cried, dragging herself from the same direction he had come. She was dirty too and the golden plating on her belly was noticeably flushed. "The only thing we got in common, sista', is that we can blame _sky-boy over here._"

The Fallen grumbled and rolled his eyes as he tried to preoccupy himself with play-cocking his Handcannon.

Spyra's tail whipped around as she glanced angrily between the two of them. She sniffed, used the leaf of her tail to itch at her crotch, and then shuffled away in a steamed spout.

"This changes nothin'." She called over her wing.

"What changes _'nothin''?_" Ignitia quirked a brow.

"Jesus Christ, Ignitia, we _fucked._ I get people feign naivety, but, like, c'mon…" The Fallen limped in a separate direction. "I feel like you people have lived your lives as a cast in a children's game or something."

"O-Oh..." Ignitia glumly peeped, craning around and looking at her own hips for some reason. She pumped a flame out of her snout and grumbled like a displeased alligator. "_Oh._"

"Are we movin' or what?" Spyra shouted. "All these stupid rocks are starting to make me dizzy just lookin' at 'em!"

"F-Fallen, might I have a word with you before we-"

"_...'scuse me, Ignitia._" The human hadn't even heard her. He was too busy slipping the rest of his new suit on and arming himself. He shouldered past in a jog for where Spyra was, leaving the Guardian to stew in her own conflicted chaos.

* * *

{🐉}

The rest of the flight was… well, kinda' awkward.

Nobody spoke much, that was for sure, even as the rolling draconic countryside passed below and on the horizon. Spyra always flew ahead of Ignitia, not even casting the human mounted on her back a glance.

They went by a town at one point, a little settlement of dragons with stilted cottages and colorfully roofed and shuttered buildings made of stone and metal trimmings. There was a windmill placed like a buoy among a sea of cropfields to the west.

"That's Viamsholm." Ignitia quipped over her shoulder when she noticed him staring. "It's been around for the last five hundred and ninety-seven years. I hear the bakers there make excellent potato-bread." It was the only thing anybody said during the whole travel.

_Hm, dragon-baked potato bread…_

The Fallen squinted at some woodlands as he snatched a waterskin off Ignitia's hipsash and took a long swig.

Dragons made good food, that was a pretty Multiversal thing, barring a reality or two.

_The Furies couldn't cook to save their own lives,_ he reminded himself. In fact, _nobody _back there really could, even the other civilizations. It was probably why the red one had enslaved a whole damned race to get her nourishment instead of just dishing shit up herself.

_But still, dragon-baked potato bread…_

Well, now he knew where to visit once he kicked Malefora in the teeth.

After the passage of another coastline, that was when they started to smell the war again. It started out tiny. The air changed a bit, like someone had long ago come through the sky with a gigantic wad of charred wood. He started to scan the forests and plains more attentively after that.

Next came the smoke.

Distant pillars of inky black stained the northern horizon like dark fingers. There were tens of them of varying height, though all were colossal, signs of them persisting for days and being lifted by wind currents.

"Is Oversight a wooden town?" He asked into Ignitia's earhole as they flew.

The Guardian sounded pained after she took a moment to answer him.

"No."

* * *

_**{Deadly Creatures OST: Widow Me This}**_

* * *

"_Heads up._" Spyra called over the draft. Both dragonesses gave their wings a kick as they passed belly-close the highest tips of some pine trees at the crest of a rolling hill.

The moment the woods rescinded below, they revealed a hellish sight.

The sounds of battle were an omnipresent, low-key ambiance, meshed with the occasional crack of artificial thunder and the screaming hurl of a cannon's shot. A walled settlement sprawled at the top of a mesa of coastal cliffs overlooking woodlands to the east and west, and a sea of grasslands to the south. All of it was touched by an immense coastline struggling up from the south. Rows of siege engines lye mixed in-use or idle as mobs of ant-sized infantry crawled across the burnt lands towards the city's gates up a jagged, road-licked hill. Most of the fires were billowing out from inside the city walls and not the greatest sources of wood from the surrounding forests.

The cold peaks of mountains lye past Oversight: the polar border of the very Dragon Realms. Somehow, despite the white-haze crawling off of them, the smoke stabbing through their visage like black cracks completely smothered their light.

The Fallen grimly held onto Ignitia's neck as he felt a very familiar haze settle into his guts.

_War._

No matter where he went: it always looked the same. This place stank of death, and it was just as rotten as he remembered it being.

"Ignitia?" The Fallen winced when the wind caught a droplet of moisture and specked it off his face. He craned over, seeing that the Guardian was silently crying.

"_Dayum', this place needs some remodeling!_" Spyra flapped her wings and drew along their side, purple eyes scanning the destruction ahead. "_So what's the plan? There's so many of them! How are we supposed to do anything?_"

"We'll hit them from behind!" The Fallen shouted, pointing at the stringently-staffed siege engines lining the land below Oversight's cliffs. As he spoke, a black trebuchet screeched, and a flaming meteor sailed in a wide arc before vanishing over the city walls. "Take out their siege engines and throw the rear ranks into disarray!"

"_That's a lot for two dragons and an' alien!_" Spyra gave him a now rare smirk.

"For you, me, and Ignitia? It's a piece of cake." He shook his head. "All the fighting we did in the swamps was a warm-up, you wanted a real war, Spyra? There it is, you see it? It's right in front of us."

"_Lemme' at 'em!_"

"Ignitia, me and Spyra are going to attack first and draw the majority force, you'll idle, and you'll hit the response teams from the rear once the Dark Army's committed." The Fallen patted her shoulder. "Let's see if your Moles' smithing work holds up for me in the meantime."

"I don't like that plan: Spyra should be support!" Ignitia cried.

"_Ancestors' tails, I ain't a hatchling!_" Spyra snapped. "_You both do whatever you wanna' do, I'm going in!_"

"Hold on-!" The Fallen called.

"_Wyverns!_" Ignitia flapped her wings to slow down, pointed a talon ahead. The Fallen grit his teeth when he almost fell off from the sudden stoppage. He glanced around her neck at the sky ahead.

Undulating, worm-like shapes were zipping up from the Dark Army lines below. There were tens of them, and they were gaining.

"_I got 'em!_" Spyra shouted, looping onto her back to gaze at them, where she pointed past the dip of her wing at the ground. "_You both start! I'll catch up after I clear the skies!_"

"_Spyra, no-!_"

"Let her do it." The Fallen gripped Ignitia's arm. Spyra gave him a momentary, longing glance, and then shot through the sky like a bullet, soon vanishing in the clutter of smog and space. "She's the Purple Dragon, Ignitia, she can do her job, and she does it well. She'll be okay."

"-I-I-…" Ignitia stammered over her own tongue. She shivered, bit down, and composed herself. "I know she will be."

"But she can only tie up so many at a time…"

"There's more of them." Ignitia nodded.

"…Crap." The smoke was working to clog up his eyes even through the wind, but all that soot still couldn't hide the amount of Wyverns zipping around the general area Spyra had gone to in the sky. "We have to land."

"_Now?_" Ignitia cried, craning over her own neck to gawk at him. "We're over the middle of an entire field line! I thought you were planning to land outside and attack from foot! Have you lost your mind?"

"I lost that shit years ago." He winked. Ignitia gasped as his weight shifted across her back. "See ya' down there."

"Wait- _no-!_"

The air whistled as the Fallen slipped past the dragoness' flank, and plummeted like a silver and gold bomb towards the ground below. The drop would've killed him without some improvisation. Luckily, the Dark Army punks had been generous enough to leave a lot of infrastructure around.

The flank of a black, stone-like trebuchet engine gleamed under the heels of his boots as he landed in a slide down one of the support ribs holding the launcher's pulley aloft. Pebbles and dust scattered onto the earth as he rode the molten-rock making the banister like it was a ramp.

He landed in a roll, his armor clattering with his jerky movements. The Fallen skidded to a halt, taking a second to breathe before standing up.

Five more of the siege engines towered straight of ahead of him in a sparsely grassed clearing. Before them, however (and much more concerning) was a cluster of eight or so lumbering creatures almost a head taller than he was.

They had gnarly crocodilian heads, beady little red eyes and rows of snaggle-teeth in their black-dripping maws. Shanty plates of crude armor slabbed down their painfully thin bodies, and each of them wielded a double-handed weapon of some variety.

One of the Orcs bellowed raggedly and ran at him with an axe raised over its head.

The Fallen sneered and ripped his new toys off his belt. The gladius in the right, the Handcannon in the left.

Finally.

Some _action_.

The Orc swung. He rolled under its arm and staggered straight behind it, his own armor almost knocking him on his ass. He _really_ needed to get used to the whole medieval-era weight again…

The gladius penetrated and summarily burst out the other side of the Orc's throat. Its blood felt like anything else's blood he'd spilled around here. It was warm and gooey, but it was colored black, like muddy ink.

The Fallen cringed as life-tar spattered up his arm and ran down to his elbow like watery molossus. He used a heel to slip the convulsing Orc off his blade and spiraled around to face his next opponents.

The Orcs came at him in a mob. He jammed out his Handcannon and yanked the trigger.

**_BANG~!_**

-The sound was deafening, it was like a crack of thunder going off right in his palm.

An Orc tossed over his own heels when the corner of his face and skull exploded in a misting cloud of chunky gore.

The Fallen cocked the gun up and blinked.

Huh.

Looks like the Moles back at the forge had been pretty spot-on with their expectations. If just one round could do that, who knew what it would look like when a Mole gatling gun was on full-auto spraying a pack of these guys…

Meat giblets.

He _loved_ those kinds of weapons.

Steel screamed as he parried the flank of an axe and stuck the gladius through an eye when the Orc fell with the momentum. He tore free, spun, and carved open another's neck. He thumbed the barrel-latch, and the Handcannon barked again, an Orc flopping away with just his lower jaw and nothing topping it.

Clusters of Orcs were emerging from the surrounding area now, and at their feet were stout green horrors wielding little polearms and blades.

_Grublins._

So _that's_ what the fuckers looked like…

They were hideous. Like, inside of someone's asshole hideous. And green. He _hated_ shit that was green.

The first of the little goblinoids to reach him flipped away in a shrill shriek when he punted it in the face like it was a football. The cleated heel of his boot impaled it through the eyes and cracked its skull. The Fallen spun and slashed in a low hack with his sword. A trio of Grublins bleated loudly as black trenches spewed gore the moment they appeared as incisions across their faces.

_Good thing I packed close to the tit._

The Fallen diced with his gladius and cocked the Handcannon. The moment the fighting lulled, in one deft movement, he slipped a new pair of shells out, fed them, and snapped the barrel shut.

Practice made perfect.

He threw himself back into the melee not even a second later.

Foot infantry were always the most fun to fight. They provided just enough of a challenge to make things interesting, but they were always so predictable, that the battle could easily slide into a trained motion of parries, slashes and hacks, like a bunch of puzzle pieces into allocated puzzle slots.

Tens of Grublins scurried over the dead, flanking by duos of armored Orcs who screeched and hooted in a challenge to him. The Fallen killed them all without discrimination. Flesh squelched, bones snapped, the Handcannon barked, and only those who didn't lose their heads or throats in the first strike had the liberty of dying with screams leaving their mouths.

Black gore was soon caking the Fallen's armor, obscuring the beautiful craftsmanship with macabre schemes of victorious slaughter.

He trapped an Archer Orc's arm in the crook of his joint, and yanked his shoulder forwards, snapping the elbow like it was a twig. The Orc screamed, and the Fallen kicked out his knee, decapitating the freak the moment he angled prone. He snatched up the crossbow from its claw and shot a Grublin between the eyes before using it like a club to cave in another's skull. The Handcannon was back in its sash. He no longer had time to reload. There were too many of them for that now.

But _not_ too many for him to take on in general.

The Fallen felt a sting of glee as he butchered the Dark Soldiers. A tiny glaive licked sparks off his ankleplate. An axe rung like a gong when he used his arm-shield to blunt the overhead strike. At least these people could fight.

Ignitia hadn't been lying when she'd said they were a step above the Apes.

This was pretty fun.

The Fallen gave off a bellow as he slashed his way through a thick mob of Grublins, hacking them aside with each strike like a machete through thick ferns. A brief memory slid into his mind about two nights earlier, his discussion with Morinth, on the edges of the dragonfly village.

"_So you enjoy killing?_"

He roared until his throat became raw, using his foot to keep a Grublin's head down as he yanked at its legs, veins straining from his neck and arms.

_I suppose it isn't half bad when they deserve it._

Flesh tore and bones crunched. The Grublin started convulsing like a fish out of water as he ripped its legs raggedly out of their sockets in a gushing torrent of glistening, black blood. He threw the dismembered limbs in an Orc's face and rolled to snatch up his sword where it had fell.

_Who's next?_

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Ace Combat & OST: Eastern Wind}**_

* * *

Things already felt different, and it wasn't just because the whole fucking place smelt like burning stuff.

Spyra noticed a vibrant quiver down her wingline and tail as she sailed over the blackened landscape passing beneath her breast. She flexed her paws and unsheathed their hooked claws. The purple dragon took a brief glance back the way she had come, trying to pick out the Fallen or Ignitia, and failing to.

_They'll be alright._

It was odd.

She was about to commit to her first battle outside of her own home and all she could think about was her and the Fallen right now. The same mentality a hatchling had about the subject of growing up could be applied here. So many believed that you _thought differently_ when you got older, when the reality was, you never noticed the subtle shifts over the course of years.

It had only been a month or so, and Spyra hadn't felt anything until right now, one of those things being about her anger.

It was lighter.

Maybe it was just the adrenaline…

But, having recently been with her mate, feeling the rush in her blood of worthy opponents on the approach: Spyra smiled and flapped her wings ardently.

_This_ was what it must be like to be a full-fledged dragoness of the North. She liked it.

The Wyverns up close were as ugly as she was anticipating them being. They had snarling, goblinoid faces and scab-red rows of scutes and scales protecting their limber, wriggling forms. They flew at her in a disorganized squadron of bodies. The closest one shrieked as the last bits of distance were severed. It swept its glider-wings and ascended. Spyra dived.

They met in a yin-yang of strikes. Spyra ducked her head and curdled her wings. The Wyvern screamed as its hooked claws swept uselessly over her head. She felt her skull shiver under the duress of a terribly strong impact, and the wet warmth of blood spewed over her scalp and flooded the hair-like ridges scaling down to her spine.

Spyra snarled and corkscrewed her whole form, ripping her bronze horns free in a spray of viscera. She took the Wyvern with her and sent it flipping listlessly to the ground below, trailing a stream of gore from its ruined chest.

Fanning out her membranes to afford a levitative glide, Spyra swung down and avoided the cloven head of a Wyvern's weaponized tail. She swept upwards and showered the beast in a torrent of flame that vaporized the concentration point on its body and cauterized everything else. It didn't even shriek before falling as a crispy, large hunk of charcoal. She zipped like a purple bolt of lightning among its fellows, arms of electricity flickering out and striking Wyverns out of the sky like she was a gigantic bug-zapper.

They fell from her, flickering light dancing over their blackened corpses. Her and another collided chests, locking talons and snarling at one another.

Spyra heaved her forepaws' muscles and hefted the Wyvern's weight. It screamed in her face, exposing rows of uneven, crooked fangs and the depths of a horribly smelling, ichor-dripping throat. It tried to bite her across the head. She craned her neck, almost entwining it with the Wyvern's before sinking her teeth into its throat.

The moment blood started flowing over her tongue, she channeled electricity, feeling the monster spasm and dance as streams of power zapped the life out of it. The blood started to taste different, like it was becoming the juice flowing out of a perfectly rare steak.

She spat the Wyvern free and sent the body corkscrewing by latching her tail's leaf against its flank and hurling it down.

_Just like killin' Giant Mosquitos back home._

Spyra growled in approval.

The slash of a bladed tail caught her attention painfully as a bleeding wound was sliced through the flesh of her upper arm. The dragon roared angrily and snared her tail around the Wyvern's, yanking down and angling her throat, a cone of flames shooting out.

She ignited the monster's head and swung it bodily like a pendulum, colliding it and another of its kin with a crunch of bone. The two soon-to-be-corpses plummeted.

_Clear the skies,_ she mused over her own words, slicing, flying, zapping and frying. _Easy easy._

* * *

{🐉}

Ten, fifteen, twenty…

Forty-five…

Fifty-eight…

Ninety…

…_Now_ this was getting a bit tiring.

_Shit._

The Fallen cringed as an Orc twice his size and with a pair of totem-banners jutting from behind its pauldrons rushed him. An officer.

The beast smacked his gladius out of his hand with the dash of a handaxe. The Orc was wielding two of them, and came at him from the other side with a summary slash.

The human was forced to double back as the Orc officer pressed the advantage and ruthlessly applied pressure with constant jabs and slices. One strike carved a rent into the Fallen's breastplate, and another ripped scales off the mail skirt protecting his belly.

Vaulting on a heel, the Fallen put his training to use and threw himself, grappling the Orc's arm and throwing him to the dirt as he undulated and spun his form in a cartwheel.

The Orc barked and his axes went flying. The Fallen kicked him in the head, scrambled across his larger ribcage, and grabbed up his other arm. He aligned the elbow against his own shoulder and yanked horizontally, the bones crunching and daggering the Orc's forearm in a straight line on the wrong side of its joint.

He picked up one of the officer's axes and swatted away a pair of Grublins coming at him like they were errant flies. He mounted the Orc's chest, lost the axe by throwing it blade-first through another Orc's forehead, and then stepped low to kill his original target.

The officer screamed in his face, razor-sharp teeth gleaming dirtily as rents of spittle flecked onto the Fallen.

_Ugly fucker._

The human gripped the sides of the Orc's head and aligned his thumbs with its eyes. He jammed them down and twisted the knuckles, pinning the beast as its screams hitched horrifically, and glistening, oily blood bubbled up around his fingers and fled down the sides of its angular helm.

**_Crnch~!_**

-The Fallen saw stars and flew onto his side. His vision- though blurry –enlightened him a second later.

The Orc who had smacked him upside the head with a warhammer tried to bring the weapon down and into his guts. The Fallen rolled and the hammer ate dirt. He righted himself, brought his arm-shield across the Orc's face and broke his jaw before diving for his lost gladius, lying under some of the bodies.

A cluster of infantry exploded in a wash of fire, their screams muted when Ignitia landed in their midst and shattered their crisping bodies with a series of claws and tail-slashes.

"_I was wondering where you went!_" The Fallen laughed as he killed. "_I'm going for the siege engines! Care to join me?_"

"_Certainly._" Ignitia called with a hot smirk. Together, man and dragon hacked and slashed their way through the tide.

"-Do they have any that don't need a team?" The Fallen heaved when they met halfway in the heart of a field of corpses, some still steaming from her breath. He gestured to all the black trebuchet-like weapons in rows. "Maybe a cannon?"

Ignitia craned over his shoulder and spat a fireball across the field. An Archer rearing back with a crossbow popped like a flaming pimple from the hips up.

"Does that suffice?" The Guardian breathlessly nodded to the top of a rocky outcrop hill. There was a molten-looking ballista mounted on plated wheels, its curved face pointed for the city just ahead. "It's a Dark Army ballista, it can be worked with only two souls if need be…"

The Fallen's grin was manic.

"Wanna' see some fireworks?" He asked, jabbing a thumb back-forth between them.

"If you're offering to treat a lady to a show, how could I resist?" Ignitia laughed.

They killed a few stragglers on their way to the ballista. A Grublin sitting in the controls glanced over the spine of a black, stone-like throne, perhaps shocked, before the Fallen Handcannoned him in the face.

"I'll load." Ignitia huffed, nodding to the interior of the little setup beyond the throne spine. "The controls are too small for me, and you have more deft hands than my claws."

"How are we looking on ammunition?" The Fallen climbed up a stalagmite meant to act as a ladder rung and clanked into the throne, adjusting and wrapping his hands around a pair of dumbbell levers meant to activate some unseen mechanism to fire the barbed, black harpoon bolt mounted in the center of the curve. There wasn't even a line or a knocking point...

_Dark magic,_ he figured, running his fingers down the molten rock-like material making the siege engine's structuring. The amber cracks bleeding lava-light actually gave off intense heat to the touch.

Ignitia grinned when she found a stack of barbed boltshots lying by the ballista's wheel. There had to be fifty or sixty man-sized harpoons just waiting to be fired…

"I think ammunition is in abundance, yes?" She peered over the outcrop. They had an overhead view of a whole sprawl of the Dark Army's line. Scatterings of infantry were still lumbering about or advancing towards the city. Rows of trebuchet engines and leftover siege towers made of scrap, wood and bound with molten-veins were everywhere. "It looks like they haven't seen us."

"How inopportune for them."

"They use these ballistas to fire on solid walls_,_ so that means-"

"_Hell yes._" He clapped his hands, searching around the dumbbell levers, before giving off an '_A-ha!'_ –of success. "Watch this."

* * *

_**{Half-Life 2 Ep2 OST: Eon Trap}**_

* * *

He cranked a pair of wooden discus wheels, and the ballista creaked as its curve dipped to align the loaded barbed head with a nearby trebuchet. The Fallen snickered, gripped the dumbbells, and yanked them backwards.

**_Shhh-CHKKK~!_**

-The ballista bucked and steel screamed.

The bolt smacked into the trebuchet's rear two-support banisters and snapped them, rock and all, in blasts of smoke. Grublins scattered, screaming, as the siege engine toppled and crushed many of them in a thundering mess of debris.

Ignitia cheered and the Fallen laughed.

"How long you think we can keep it up before someone gets up here?" He grinned.

"When wanting: one eager must find out." Ignitia stood on her hinds and shoved another bolt into the curve's feed. "Do it!"

**_Shhh-CHKKK~!_**

"Aim it to the left! Look at how they lined up that row!" Ignitia frantically pointed with her tail as he sluggishly reangled the curve, the discus wheels creaking again and again. "Hurry, Fallen, _hurry!_"

"I've got it. I've got it." He mumbled, jerking the dumbbells back.

**_Shhh-CHKKK~!_**

The bolt punched through the banisters of three trebuchets in a straight line. The engines collapsed in moaning roars, crushing most of their teams and scattering the rest.

"It's like shooting fish in a barrel." He joked. The Fallen turned an eye to her as Ignitia shoved another harpoon into the feed slot. "Did you see Spyra on your way down?"

"No." The Guardian's excitement dampened for a moment as she shook her head. "She couldn't have gone too far though… I-I hope…"

"Peace, Ignitia." He fired the mechanism after a quick readjustment of the curve. "That girlie can take care of herself in a place like this just fine…"

**_Shhh-CHKKK~!_**

A siege tower fell into its own basing as the bolt punched through and out the other side. Another bolt took out a trio of black catapult-like engines. Explosive ammunition had been lying nearby. Some of the debris hit it and the cache cooked off with a brilliant series of mushroom clouds and flashes of light. Flaming bodies were hurled like dark, crispy confetti.

Ignitia laughed at the destructive display, grabbing another bolt in her teeth as she pranced back to the curve's feed. Her eyes went wide, suddenly, and the harpoon rolled out of her mouth.

"_Fallen!_" She pointed to the far flank. "Turn around! Aim it that way! _Quickly_!"

He didn't ask what-for, trusting the Guardian's judgment, and started cranking the wheels. He glanced over the throne setup's rim, blinking at what he saw lumbering up the side of the outcrop towards them.

"What the fuck is that?" He grunted as she loaded another bolt. "A Golem or something?"

"It's a Troll!" She breathed running around and joining him at the latch-release. "Aim for its head! Their bodies are almost impervious."

"You got it."

The beast was the size of a small house. It ran on all fours, with stubby rear legs, and beefy, rock-like fists. Its shrill, squeaky roar echoed, and the ground began to quiver.

The ballista coughed and a bolt whipped out.

It tore into the Troll's mossy shoulder and burst out the other side. The beast screamed, but it kept coming. The ground was now shaking.

"Give me another shot." He squirmed in his feet, fists turning white on the dumbbells. Suddenly, the armor he'd been given felt like it was made of tin-foil.

Damn it, he missed his gear.

Ignitia was visibly terrified. She almost dropped the next bolt before sliding it home and running back to stand beside him, as if being in proximity to the human would make the situation any better.

"_Rear your neck up, you fuck._" The Fallen snarled, oblivious to her peril as concentration strangled his attentions. "_Come on._"

"It's too close-!" Ignitia shrieked.

**_Shhh-CHKKK~!_**

The bolt punched through the Troll's head, popping the cranium open, and throwing brain chunks and bits of skull in the rivulets of blood that followed. The monster tripped over its heels and tumbled mid-way up the hill with a pattern of thunderous crashes. It came to a stop a little ways off from the nose of the ballista, kissed by dust, now a giant corpse.

"You're right…" The Fallen let go of a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. "_too_ close."

Ignitia suddenly gave off a shrill squeal, and the Fallen felt the upper portion of his body become crushed in the heavy grip of forepaws.

"_Oh, that was exhilarating, and terrifying, and insane, and-! Oh, that was the most fun I've had in _months!"

"Ignitia. My neck."

The Fire Guardian gasped, realizing too late that not only had she sounded like Volteera and hugged the Fallen in a half-nelson, but she practically had her snout shoved in his face through the helm's visor too.

"_I'm sorry!_" She squeaked, releasing him and standing erect on her hinds, a maddened flush bleeding across her snout and her wings and tail twitching.

_Jeez', she really _really_ does smell like cinnamon… even when she's covered in sweat and other people's blood._

The Fallen felt an excitement bubble in his chest despite their surroundings.

Hell, he'd fucked in a battlefield already once in his time here…

"P-Please don't mind my excitability, t-that was unprofessional…" Ignitia shivered and fell back to her fours. The poor Guardian had to turn her snout away in some vain attempt to hide the crimson impossibly showing through her already red scale tone. "-_Ahem,_ what I _meant_ to say before, was _g-good job_."

The Fallen blinked and then snickered, his fingers drawing slowly up the Guardian's bronze-plated throat and ending at her chin. Ignitia went bug-eyed and almost stumbled face-first into the side of the ballista's throne setup when he gently tugged her forward.

"Now _there's_ a side of you that I'd love to see more of, my red-hot, smexy derg-nugget."

**_Fwoof~!_**

Ignitia creamed her tail, stuttering over her own words.

"Oh fuck- _lookout-!_"

"W-Wha-?"

The Fallen threw himself out of the throne setup and tackled Ignitia across the chest.

Man and dragon tumbled into the dirt right as something thin and black whipped over them in a blur, and shredded the center of the ballista in a scream of metal and rock. The weapon crunched inward and sprawled down the hill in two pieces, rumbling the earth.

The Fallen craned his head up and sneered. There was another ballista set up on the edge of a hill nearby, manned by a gaggle of cackling Grublins, some of whom were dancing on top of the weapon and pointing at them madly with stout swords.

"Little bastards." He growled.

"_F-Fallen…?_" Ignitia's voice came out as a muffled peep. She had cupped her snout with her paws, the blush now feverishly blaring.

The Fallen glanced down at himself and blinked. He was laying on top of her, armored hips snugly placed between her thick thighs. Ignitia was caught between trying to hide every obvious change in her person. Thusly, she was engaged in a strange grabbing-dance. She grabbed her face when she started flushing, she grabbed her chest when a felinoid purr started to rumble in her breast…

_Oh, if the moment weren't so important…_

"We can discuss the possibility of introducing you to my dragon-slayer when this is over." He grinned, patting her hips. "But for now, what do you say we-"

"_AAHHHHHHHHHHH~!_"

Something zipped through the air and slammed into the human's armored flank with a crunch of metal.

Ignitia noticed that despite the object being very loud, blurred and otherwise unrecognizable: there was no denying of its color.

Which was purple.

"_If it means that I have to get in a fuck every time you go and grab some cheap-ass floozy for me to be the favorite, then so fuckin' be it!_" Spyra screamed at the top of her lungs, the Fallen gagging, cross-eyed, as she strangled him with her Grublin-bloodied forepaws and smacked his head into the dirt. She released him roughly (_released_ being a kind description for dropping his skull into the dust) and then spiraled her angry gaze onto Ignitia, who was mortified, and shivering as she peeled herself off the ground. "_Back off, cougar! He's **mine**! You get him afterwards!_"

"_*cough-cough* -w-well… that was exhilarating_…" The Fallen rubbed his neck and started to sit up. "…Glad to see you're in once piece, Spyra. Me and Ignitia are doing crimes, want in too? Woah-woah-woah, waitasecond_whatthefuckareyoudoing-?!_"

"_Shut up._" Spyra snarled biting, clawing and yanking at the straps and scale-mail over his hips. "_Get this off._"

"Wait, wait- _No._ No that isn't how this works! We have to break the siege first!"

"_No,_ first, _you shoot your kids down my throat, and then in my egg-hole,_ then we break the siege…" Spyra snarled. He paused.

"While that idea sounds amazing, I'm covered in blood, _you're_ covered in blood, and forgetting the important battle for a second: I'd prefer to not get Grublin-AIDs thank you very much-!" The Fallen placed his hands on Spyra's horns and started to shove her off. "Ignitia! You're the voice of reason all the time, help a brother out here-! _Wait- NO-!_"

Spyra yipped when a finned, crimson tail smacked into her face and sent her rolling. The Fallen didn't even have a chance to blink before Ignitia pinned him, and _she_ started yanking and biting and clawing at his armor to get it off.

"_Have you all lost your collective fucking minds?!_" He howled.

"Yes indeed they have!" A duplicate of himself appeared around the corner of a boulder, giving a thumbs-up and wink.

"_Fuck off, Conscience!_"

"This will go much better for both of us if you simply sit still, Fallen." Ignitia muttered. "_J-Just get these blasted breaches out of my way. Right now, please._"

Spyra snarled and attacked from the flank. Her and Ignitia went sprawling down the hillside in a tussle of dragon limbs and wings.

When they reached the bottom, they slammed into the base of a trebuchet, and the siege engine collapsed inward with a blast of smoke and debris, its destructive death-screech echoing across the land.

* * *

_**{Halo 4 OST: Push Through}**_

* * *

"Stick it up your tail, grandma, the human's mine!" Spyra howled when the two 'nesses rolled out the other side of the fiery cloud, their elemental make-ups rendering them nigh-impervious to the flames licking off their bodies and wings. "_I saw him first!_"

"With respect, my student, you should appreciate the wants of your elders!" Ignitia snapped. She fanned her wings out from behind her back, smacking Spyra across the face and chest. The purple heroine went reeling into the air. "I am the Guardian of _Flame! _Sentry of Warfang! Technically, you're under _my_ authority, seeing as you have no rank in our structure!"

"Rank_ this!_"

Spyra flipped like a top. Her leaf-blade caught Ignitia in the cheek with a loud _crack! _–and the Guardian rolled through the dirt.

"The Fallen's _mine!_"

"We shall see, youngling!"

Ignitia hurled off the ground and collided with Spyra's breast. When they reached the ground, the slippery 'ness uncoiled from the Guardian's grip. They landed roughly, Ignitia grabbing her by the tail at the last second and throwing Spyra with the weight of her fall.

Spyra flew into a squad of Orcs and sent the infantry flying from the force of the impact. When the Dark soldiers who survived attempted to surround her, they all died in a flash of lightning, their blackened cadavers dancing away in plumes of soot.

Spyra emerged from the chaos wreathed in a glowing sphere of pure electricity. Ignitia swallowed.

The cry emerging from Spyra's throat was that of a banshee's. Ignitia felt her scales roasting when the orb touched her and exploded in a static cloud of force, cooking alive an entire mob of Grublins that had been gathering around her. Spyra landed before her and started swiping.

"_Let's see whatchyu' got, grams-!_" She howled. "_This'll teach ya' to watch me rattle around some dipshit arena chasin' a fuckin' sprite-!_"

Ignitia snarled as the electricity coursing through her veins caused her to jolt and twitch. She parried Spyra's blows with her wrists, or locked talons and dragged the connections off into their flanks. She tried to catch Spyra with her tail, but the purple dragoness rolled under the swipe and sprung.

She flew past Ignitia's neck and dragged her wing across the Guardian's face. The blow cracked out like a punch and caused Ignitia to preen on her heels like a horse.

"See that?! Old age musta' rusted up the joints!" Spyra cackled. "_You're outta' the game!_"

"_I. Am. Not. **OLD.**_"

Spyra was there one second and was gone the next.

A fireball spat from Ignitia's chops caught her in the breast. There was a flash of light and a bark of thunder. Spyra flipped like a spiraling thread of debris for over twenty feet and ended her journey painfully: smashing through the roof of a storage tent. The structure buckled and collapsed in a blast of fire and smoke, killing a score of nearby infantry.

Suddenly, the flames whipped and a purple missile came streaking out. Spyra bellowed and landed in front of the Guardian. The very earth buckled and cracked, a crater crushing itself into existence as a wave of lightning shot out in a spreading ring. It fried Orcs and Grublins and caused a catapult to cave in on itself. It also hit Ignitia and sent her cartwheeling backwards.

The fire dragoness caught her fall via her wings, flapped, and was on top of Spyra again instantly. Spyra zipped in a zig-zag and dodged three consecutive cones of spat fire before leaping. Ignitia swatted her away like she was a fly, having only a second to growl victoriously, before an arm of lightning shot her out of the sky.

She fell, trailing soot, and landed on the flank of a catapult. The siege engine buckled and the loaded dish-arm jolted westward. The restraints snapped and as the weapon collapsed into a flaming heap, the lit firebrand loaded in the brazier was launched in a hellish arc. It ended its journey nearby in a brilliant explosion, hitting a platoon of Dark infantry advancing towards the gates of Oversight.

From nearby, the Fallen cringed as he continued working.

_This wasn't the original plan,_ he thought, slashing an Orc across the throat and vaulting the corpse over his shoulder. _But I suppose it's doing what it needs to do._

As the two mighty dragonesses effectively beat the piss out of one another in a hormonally-driven, whirlwind of a stupor, all of the attention was going right on to _them,_ and in addition, the level of destruction they were causing was most appealing.

_It's a good distraction at least…_

"_-And_ yet another one caused by the Spear of Truth, too!" Conscience appeared, fully bedecked in the same golden suit of armor as he ran beside him. "Think of all the power you wield with that thing! This really has become about something else other than finding a ticket home!"

"Now is _not_ a good time." He snarled, heaving as he rolled a firebrand into the rest of the pile and hopped back.

"You're the one who questioned if you even _had_ a home."

"_I_ _do!_" The Fallen barked, beheading a Grublin and shooting a Handcannon round that punched through three. "_I jus_t _take it with me!_"

He fired the second bullet at the firebrand pile and ignited them.

A gigantic explosion rocked him back on his heels and drowned the world in amber light. The pile cooked off the pile next to it, and the one after that and then some, ripping apart each catapult they were originally intended for one after another.

_Just a few more of those, and the rear will be crushed._

Right as he locked blades with an Orc, he and the monster heard the rush of flame and glanced off to the right. The Orc screamed like a girl, and the Fallen almost shit himself.

The combatants held one another and ducked to the dirt right as Spyra flew by wreathed in fire. She landed in a cluster of tents with a burst of flame, and soon the whole hovel was burning. A minute later, Ignitia flew over and threw herself into the flames after her. Another explosion, an angry roar, it was the _Guardian_ this time flying away with a very angry purple menace latched onto her gut.

"Damnation. Can you believe I've slept with the purple one?" He looked at the Orc laying over his chest. The ugly beast blinked. "Hell, I might just get under the tail of the red one too, but, uh, the last thing I need right now is a therapist to listen to my sexy problems one and two."

He craned the Handcannon up and shot the Orc through the face, before rolling the corpse off.

"Despite the hiccups: I _love_ my job."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night OST: Dreams}**_

* * *

"-'ve always wondered how dragons could be so audaciously prudish and amazingly obtrusive to take offense to such things. It isn't like personal space and bubbles matters when you're participating, being one with and so eagerly utilizing such services as a _dancing hall_. It was for the political elite too, in addition, and of course! We didn't need invitations, little things on slippages of parchment, paper and-"

Cynder was about ready to crane her tailblade over and slit her own wrists.

Unfortunately, she needed those to tie up the rest of the chains.

Metal clunked as the final link went into place, and the seals began to glow ardently with powerful magicks. Cynder blinked against the glare and huffed through her chops, taking a second to turn her dreadful, pale gaze up just a bit, so that she was level with Volteera's yellow snout.

The Guardian of Electricity was currently chained up on a duplicate platform to Cyrila's, all the way in the mountains above Oversight. Yet, she was chattering away and glancing around at everything with bashful interest, like she was on some leisure trip, talking the damned horns off her own grandmother or someone similarly too senile to know when to tell the hyperactive hen to shut up.

"-As it was, it was an unimportant, meaningless interactivity, but to know the untimely truth and sole reason for the rejection was that he was presently courting another was much distressing to me in my younger years! Ignitia was already a Guardian, and Terradora was off fighting, and Cyrila hated me so I didn't have a clue or inkling or standing notion to where she was! I felt so trapped! Ha-ha! ….A-Actually, I still do many days at especially later times, evenings, nights, hours of darkness…" The Electric Dragon's eyes went glassy and she looked through Cynder at something only she could see. The black dragoness' eye twitched, and for a moment, she thought the unbearable tide of vocal murder had ceased.

Then, Volteera blinked, and her mouth didn't even take a second to rev up before exploding again.

"You've shared some degree of conversation and communication and basing with my sister, Ignitia, so you'll have to excuse, pardon and understand my assumption that a small, tiny or quarter-portion of informatory senses might be allowed in our-"

"If you do not shut your mouth this instant, I'll ram my tailblade up your ass, and _twist it_ to shut your mouth for you…" Cynder jammed their noses together with an enraged growl. She shouted. "_Like you're a fucking sock-puppet!_"

Volteera sucked up her own chops and blinked with wide eyes. When Cynder reclined with a tortured sigh and sat on her haunches to claw at her temples, the Guardian cleared her throat and glanced at both her wrists, which were restrained on either side of her chest. She started drumming their talons on the metal of the platform, appearing to be in thought.

"…I see." Was all she muttered.

"Oh, you _see?_ Thank the Ancestors, I thought no one could!" Cynder sarcastically cackled, slapping her claws together and clenching them tightly under her chin as she smiled manically at her. That smile was then instantly wiped away for a grimacing sneer. "You think you can see, Guardian? You see nothing. You're just as blind as you were a few hours ago living your insipid life _outside_ my clutches."

"…Forgive me, Cynder, but I wasn't talking about your reasons for action, I hardly think that any dragon could understand what goes on in your mind."

Cynder went to open her mouth, and then shriveled, like a swiftly dying flower thrown in bleach.

Volteera glanced at her with a sheepish smile.

"I've always seen what ails those who come into contact with me, or brush paths with me or-" The Guardian coughed. "-I _was_ taking note of your current disposition and mood."

"…Really now." Cynder chuffed, crossing her forepaws and letting her elegant tail curl around her haunches. "That's _very_ interesting. Maybe you could elaborate on your findings without using fifty sentences and the next two hours. If you want an observation from _my_ eyes, Guardian. Honestly, I don't feel petty when I say to you with honesty that I hope my words gnaw at your damned guts."

"T'is something I have suffered the predations, and conquests, and unwanted attentions of since my conception. Your belittlement, and harshness and venom is nothing in comparison to the last thirty years." Volteera sounded like she was trying to polite in her rebuttal. Cynder would've normally laughed, but…

"Oh, Volteera…" The black dragon turned her head away with a pained huff. "…Brush off whatever you will, and I know you would never be given a reason to care, but know this in addendum: you refusing my Mistress' offer all those years ago pains me with the lost opportunity."

"Opportunity?"

"We have so much in common." Cynder shivered. "_Ugh,_ that tasted fouler than I thought it would…"

Volteera blinked.

Then she started laughing.

"_What._" The Cloud Ripper stood up and snarled. "You think this is _funny?_"

"-N-No-! Not at a-all-! _Ha-!_" Volteera calmed her hysterics, still smiling as she cleared up her throat and spoke again. "What _is_ very brazenly worth such lighthearted lamentation is your naivety."

"…._Naivety?_" Cynder lowered the threatening stance of her wings. Now _she_ was smiling too. "…Ancestors, you fooled me. I thought you were going to say something witty."

"But it is true."

"_Yes,_ I've suddenly realized I have no time for this." Cynder whipped around, her paws whispering through the grass as she began to depart. "Enjoy your stay, Volteera, it'll be the last moment you'll be able to lay down anywhere ever again. I appreciate the chat."

"But, Cynder?"

"_Good. Bye._"

"You erroneously forgot my gem."

Cynder screeched to a halt at the edge of the grotto, her blackened form meandering to turn and glare over her own wings.

Volteera grinned with all her fangs and nodded at the empty cup smelted into the foot of her prison-pedestal.

"You most obviously and clearly need my Mana for some cantankerous, devious and ultimately fruitless endeavor."

"…It isn't _cantankerous._" Cynder growled, trotting back over and casting her gaze to the flank.

A small, hunchbacked and hideous creature scurried over, holding up a duplicate looking crystal to the one currently residing with Cyrila in the mountains.

The Fly-breed Grublin buzzed its little wings, jumping away with a yip of fright when Cynder roughly snatched the gem out of its claw.

"Begone, filth." She spat, and the Grublin and gaggle of its fellows zipped into the afternoon woods surrounding the clearing, sounding like fat, impossibly large bumblebees on the move. "I hate those things."

"Did you not play a role, a part, or a chance in creating them?" Volteera cocked her head as Cynder gripped the gem in her jaws and crossed back over to her.

"_I didh not._" The Cloud Ripper muffled, spitting the gem out and sliding it into the opening. "There, Volteera, now your coffin has its final nail. This will be the last time you will ever see me."

"A feat soon to be gathered, accomplished and met, one you seem less than eager, or with purpose, or gusto to leave behind." The Guardian smiled briefly, flexing her blue wings against the chains. "You have your own reasons for this mission you have undertaken. What happened down south?"

"I lost." Cynder grumbled. "Doesn't everyone already know that for god's sake?"

"They do, but I hardly, impossibly and frankly refuse to think so of your purpose for kidnapping me. Might my last wish be to have clarity, clearness, a possible definition for my reason of demise?"

"Why does it matter why I'm killing you? You're dead no matter the reason."

"See? See? This is why we are not alike. _This_ is why I laugh, and scoff, and boorishly rebuke your earlier proclamation." Said Volteera. "You want an end through hatred and anger. I wanted an end through desperation and solitude and sadness. Why I am always apart, different, saved and all from being like you is for the good I seek to keep alive, and protected, and whole."

"_Wanted?_" Cynder quirked a brow, feeling no satisfaction, surprisingly, when the confidence in Volteera's expression shattered like glass. "Nobody ever just _tries_ to want something like that."

"Y-You're right." Volteera gave the first angry expression Cynder had seen from her outside of battle. It wasn't much, but for someone as bubbly as the Guardian, it might as well have been a sign of the impending apocalypse. "A fact I am certain, and positively and undoubtedly confident in saying that _you_ know all too well, emerging in the ruination, and massacring, and wholesale slaughter of _infants-_"

Cynder punched her in the mouth.

The Guardian sputtered and yanked against the chains, her head roughly jolted away and leaking fresh blood from the nostrils. Volteera spat on the metal and shivered, remaining silent.

"Fuck you, Volteera." Cynder stomped closer and gripped the Guardian's blue crown, yanking her face close to her own and sneering. "_Fuck. You._ I think the insanity of all this will turn out to be: that _if _there is a draconic kingdom of heaven in the sky, and a hell below that, I might just find all of you down there in the latter with me. Wouldn't that be a treat? I know it would be. And for your information: I wish you had laid down and died twenty-five years ago. The world would've been bettered for it, and quieter too."

She threw Volteera back down and turned away. The gem hummed and Volteera gasped as a vibrant, yellow glow began to light up the clearing. The gem started to sap away her energy sluggishly.

"I _wish_ that too." Volteera weakly mumbled, curling up like a dying spider.

"Then we _are_ alike." Cynder spat, pointing back at the pedestal with her tail. "Make sure nobody interrupts the ritual. If you see interlopers: kill them. If the human arrives, capture him at all costs, or I'll kill all of _you _that are left."

The Orc grunted and hefted a battleaxe on its pauldron. More Grublin Flies materialized out of the shadows and zipped around the clearing.

Cynder spread her blood-red wings and took to the sky, not even glancing back at the pitiful creature she had just murdered twice.

* * *

{🐉}

_He certainly looked important…_

The Fallen sneered and dragged his gladius out of the confines of the Orc's chest cavity. The bulky creature's eyes rolled back and it collapsed into the dirt, the thick bands of armor obscuring its emaciated body clattering like a bundle of pots and pans.

A road of bodies traced where he'd begun the latest excursion and where it had ended. The cluster of tents stood whispering over a collective of corpses. Lots of Orcs had been here. Ones wearing flaunting totem posts and officer's helmets. The campsite had a huge flagpost bearing a black and red banner at its top flapping in the breeze. He'd sent it toppling into the command tent and then had set it all on fire just to make a point.

In combination with the dragon-lady duel going on, the Fallen had been able to systematically slaughter over six command posts of what were obviously members of the leadership echelon of the Dark Army here. Those losses, and the platoons he'd butchered during the trips, all equaled to something he'd say was pretty catastrophic. Blunting the rear was the first bit of business, and as far as he was concerned, there were no siege engines left that he hadn't blown up, shot full of holes or set aflame.

From the top of the wooded hill, the shattered remains of the Dark Army's campsites looked almost relieving. Carpets of dead lye everywhere, tents and engines burned, and the skies looked clear enough, thanks to Spyra.

Turning his gaze to the walls of Oversight, the Fallen took off his helmet to wipe sweat and black blood off his face before pressing onwards, his muscles screaming, and the handful of lacerations he had suffered aching.

The Moles had done fantastic work. He could remember quite a few blows that the plating deflected that would've outright killed him had he been bare of it. An Orc had batted him in the chest with a two-handed hammer. A crossbow bolt had slid down the inclined flank of his helmet in a near-miss for his face. A few Grublins had caught him out in the open and started throwing spears.

_Maybe the furry little guys aren't so bad after all._

The journey towards the city gates was devoid of action, though he _did_ have to hike through mounds of corpses he and the two dragons had created over the last three or so hours. They hadn't liberated the city yet, but they had effectively removed the entirety of the Dark Army's artillery advantage in one fell swoop.

He looked around for Spyra or Ignitia and discovered that he could not pick them out anywhere. It was concerning, but at the same time, he needed to get inside the city.

_I'll find them._

He proceeded up the winding, cliff road leading up to the city gates. It was strewn with dead Grublins and battle damage. He had to crawl over the fly-infested remains of a Troll that had taken a cannonball to the face and was sprawled over the path. The whole thing smelt horrifically of death from beginning to end. He remembered years ago that it was the same smell that used to make him sicken.

Somehow, after so many warzones, it had stopped impacting him, at least enough so that he could operate in its thickness without difficulty.

_Smelling the dead and making the dead gets easier and easier…_

"…Yeah, so too does letting the soul slip." The Fallen grumbled, scanning the upper walls cautiously as he approached. He missed his _real_ armor. His harness had boosterpacks that could've gotten him up there in a jiffy.

Now, here he was prancing around in some medieval getup with an army of Orcs shooting fire up his ass.

If the battle damage hadn't polluted everything, he would've taken note of the beauty of the draconic architecture. The gateway arch had a pair of siege towers whose fronts facing the road had been sculpted to resemble a pair of glaring dragon heads. Their eyes were murder-slots that archers could take positions in.

"Jeez'… and there I was a few days ago, thinking these people were _sheltered._"

The grand square past the toppled gate doors looked like hell. Corpses were everywhere. A beautiful fountain and a pair of statues had been utterly smashed. The variety of storefronts and buildings sealing in the block had been shot full of holes, knocked down, were on fire, or a combination of the three.

Many of the dead were Moles and dragons.

He checked the walls again, grunting when he saw how empty the defense palisades were, and knelt beside the corpse of a blue-scaled drake. His chest had been breached right through a silver-colored cuirass, and blood was leaking out of ohis fanged mouth. A quarter of his face had been sloughed off from the cheek down, probably from a Morningstar or a maul. The Fallen closed the only eye that hadn't been shredded and surveyed the rest of the block.

He killed a trio of Grublins looting trinkets off the dead, and ended the misery of another six or seven as he perused the mounds of macabre mass. The groan of a tired voice caught his attention, and after rolling over a deceased Earth Dragon, he found the beaten, bloody form of an Orc, still breathing, little red eyes glaring at him hatefully from the street's cobble.

The Fallen raised his Handcannon for its face, but paused when he saw the finned helmet it wore, and the totem-poles jutting out from behind its pauldrons.

"_Hoo-man…_" The Orc spat blood, its voice deep and ragged. "…Dark Master… _kill you…_"

"Maybe she'll try, but there's one thing certain here: _you_ aren't going to."

He slid out his gladius and tapped it on his kneeplate.

"Tell me who and where the highest ranking commander in your army here is, or I'll saw off your foot and make you drink the blood from the stump."

The Orc sat up on the street, a claw over a series of slash-wounds across its stomach, and it started chortling.

The Fallen laughed with him, and then knelt and proceeded to follow through on his threat.

After a minute, he became used enough to the screams that he stopped wincing when they became ear-piercing.

After the second foot and a hand, the Orc started talking, quick enough too before the blood-loss made him fade.

"_Urukal… _Besieging the castle square." The Fallen followed the sounds of fighting as he departed the ruined square. "I'll put his fucking head on a pike and piss in his mouth. Maybe not in that exact order."

He had to slaughter his way through a few wandering bands of Grublins. He carried a severed, moss-like head around from one of his victims for a few blocks, and used it to get the jump in a few fights, tossing it into the middle of the squads to scare them before leaping in and slashing them all to death.

Eventually, he found a battalion of Grublins led by some Orcs taking cover among a warehouse yard or gathering in a mob at the foot of a pair of stairwells leading up to the city walls.

There was a beleaguered unit of Mole infantry and some dragons. They were trapped on the section of the wall above, engaged on the stairs and from two directions as both towers gapping their section had been taken.

The Fallen started out by butchering his way through the warehouse yard. The late afternoon sun blared through the sooty heavens and shown rays down that appeared to gleam off his golden armor in what would've been a beautiful day had the place not been burning.

Decapitating an Orc, he stomped on a Grublin until it died and then hurled himself into the rear of the ranks attacking the stairwell. An Electric Dragon scythed through the mob with a bolt of lightning, and a pair of Ices froze the front ranks at the top because of the Fallen's distractive efforts. When he slashed his way to the top, a batch of terrible-looking Mole soldiers were there to greet him.

"Didn't know the capital started recruitin' Apes." A Mole grunted as he ripped a glaive out of the twitching corpse of a Grublin. "No other way you coulda' gotten that armor from our lads down there."

"I'm not an Ape, what the hell are you, blind?" _Probably_ not the best thing to say, but he was recovering from slaughtering an entire battalion. His patience was thin, damn it.

"Partially." The Mole pointed at the goggles perched on his snout. "Hell all if we're wearing these things for anythin' else."

"Where's your commander?"

"Mind helpin' us clear the top of the wall first there, super-fighter? We can talk then."

Fifteen minutes later, the Fallen found himself surrounded by a Wing, mixed from at least three different units that had been mauled earlier in the day. Five Ice Dragons, a trio of Electrics, two Earth and a handful of Fires. It certainly made for a nice rainbow effect.

"You're the Fallen?" The only officer left was one of the Ices. He was missing an eye. Judging by the blood drying on the dressing covering it up, it had been lost within the last few hours.

_Tough bastard._

"Yes." He wiped his gladius off on a dead Orc and nodded. "Is this your whole unit?"

"Everyone who isn't lying down there in the streets and square." The dragon grunted, casting his gaze down at the sprawl of the city below. So much of it was on fire… "I'm Acirek, captain."

"Did any other units survive?" The Fallen pointed at some distant movement on the nearby defense walls and towards the castle in the center of the city. It was fat, the center bailey sprouting a trio of stout spires and a sealed squarelot of structures to its south. "And is that the capital building?"

"Most of the survivors made it back to the castle, but we think there's a few trapped on sections of the wall. Yes, that's Castle Crownhorn, Queen Lilith is there, along with one of the Guardians."

"Where is the Guardian?"

"We're not sure. We were being led by Guardian Volteera and Commander Meskfog, but she vanished and Meskfog's dead."

"Volteera's been captured by Cynder." The Fallen pointed with his sword. "The defeat at the gates was a complete overrun?"

"How do you mean?"

"Did you all scatter or not?"

"Scattered."

"God damn it…" The Fallen tugged at his bloodstained, sweaty jaw and tried to think. He was _tired._ His limbs were on fire. "…Captain, organize your unit and start gathering in the square. I'm going to send you reinforcements."

"But, there's a flight of Wyverns controlling the skies, and the Dark Army is constantly funneling _in_ through the square! It's gone!"

"The Wyverns are dead, and everyone out there," The Fallen nodded over the merlons looking out over the coast. "I sliced their blocks off. The Purple Dragon is here, as is Guardian Ignitia. Your reinforcements have come, so now it's time to get your shit together and haul ass. We're taking Oversight back."

* * *

{🐉}

Spyra swatted weakly at Ignitia's face, and the Guardian panted as she dragged her tail over her chest in what was supposed to be a fierce strike.

Exhausted, the two dragonesses collapsed on top of one another in a heap, heaving, and panting, letting their collective sweat mix.

"…I-I… _wha'?..._" Ignitia moaned. "…_W-Where am I...? S-Spyra? Spyra! A-Are you hurt?! What happened?!"_

"…Just a scratch…" Spyra genuinely grumbled, glancing at the various bruises and lacerations speckling her flank before laying her head down on Ignitia's chest and shutting her eyes for a moment. "…Did he touch you?"

"W-What? Who?" Ignitia held the sides of her head and rubbed tenderly, so shocked and confused that she didn't even know what to do.

"The _Fallen._ Did he touch you?"

They met gazes and Ignitia's mouth flapped for a moment.

"…y-yes…." She eventually squeaked.

"Then that's what happened."

Ignitia furrowed her browline and went to say something. The crumble of earth stopped her and she glanced around to take in their surroundings.

Her and Spyra were lying in the center of a blast crater. There was a trio of Dark Army designed trebuchet engines burning nearby and there were dead Orcs and Grublins everywhere, many of them burning and/or scorched to charry blackness as well.

"…It's his touch. He has… powers or something, I don't fuckin' know…" Spyra wiggled her talons and huffed over Ignitia's chest plating, looking like she was angrily sleeping. "…You musta' gone crazy, with him sittin' on ya' like that, and so… I've _been_ crazy, and here we are…"

"What are you saying?" Ignitia held onto her shoulders. "Spyra?"

"We threw each other around or something, I guess." Spyra used her wrist to wipe some stray blood on her snout away and spat over Ignitia's flank. When she noticed the Guardian's horrified expression, she wing-shrugged. "No biggie'. When I was small enough for him to actually have a chance, me and Firefly used to kick each other's asses as kids."

"_My hatchling!_" Ignitia shrieked, making Spyra sputter and scramble madly when she embraced her and squished her against her chest. The Guardian was crying hysterically. "_I-I'm so sorry!_"

"-_Step off, lady-! Damn it- Ignitia-! Lemme' go-! It's fine-! I forgive! I forgive! Peace among dragons!_"

"_I-I did it again!_" Ignitia wailed, completely oblivious to Spyra's complaints as she rocked them both in the dirt. "_I acted irresponsibly! A-And put you in harm's wayyyyy….ohhhnoo….._" She sobbed.

"_Ignitia!_" Spyra angrily sang, finally tugging free and leaping off. "Damn, Ignitia! Give a 'ness some space, will ya'…?"

"I don't even remember the last few minutes! O-Or hours!" The Guardian flew to her feet, only refraining from embracing Spyra again when the purple heroine hopped back and hissed at her like an angry crocodile. "I'm so sorry-! I'm-! I-I feel feint… I feel-"

Spyra flapped her wings, attained even height with the larger dragoness, and promptly smacked her across the face.

The poor Guardian looked like someone had just murdered her pet gerbil, and gripped the slapped cheek with both forepaws. Her eyes were wide.

"Get it together, dude! We're in the _war_ now, 'member?" Spyra barked. "Listen, I get we made a doozy, and just batted each other around like balls of yarn and shit, but we have to save that city! The Fallen's probably already inside! And what about Terradora? They both need help!"

Shellshocked, all Ignitia could do was blink and give a little nod. She still hadn't let go of her snout.

"Alright, good!" Spyra turned on a heel and hopped to the top of the crater, glancing around and sneering at all the corpses, she spread her orange wings and turned back to her. "We can talk apologies later, but right now, _fly!_"

* * *

{🐉}

"Head for the square, there are two captains already waiting with their units for you, we're assembling a response army, and we're going to attack the main force inside the city, go!"

"Go to the main square! Three units are there already, we're preparing a counter-attack! Hurry!"

"Oh shut the fuck up and just _go to the main square! _We're taking the city back. Just go. God damn it…"

The Fallen collapsed on the ground and stared at the sooty sky, blood and sweat running in rivers off of him and his armor.

As the last dragon flew off, and the last Moles marched down the stairs, the walls became empty, save all the corpses. The Fallen lounged there as his body shrieked. He couldn't even speak. He was so thirsty, that he was almost willing to kneel and start drinking some of the dead's blood puddles. He couldn't feel his arms, and his Handcannon had run out of ammunition. His breastplate was compromised by an axe strike, and one of his pauldrons had been shredded at the lower chin.

_Isn't this just grand…_ He hacked and coughed, closing his eyes and trying to imagine the inside of his cuirass was made of nesting sheets.

The Fallen made a wheezing noise. It was supposed to be a laugh.

_Nesting…_

Most humans would just say _bed._

He supposed by this long point in the journey of his life, he had been thoroughly _dragonized._ It wasn't like he could help it. After all, he talked with them, lived with them, fought beside them, fought _against_ them, had sex with them, and so forth…

_What I need is… is…._

"Water? Food? A bandaid?" Conscience strolled by, hands behind his back as he smiled down at the defeated warrior. In contrast, he just looked _divine,_ armor undamaged, face not caked with gore. "One of those regen-injections?"

"…._a good… pair…. Of _boobies."

The Fallen held out his hands in a cupping motion at the sky, letting them fall back down, hi gauntlets clattering on the brick of the wall.

"…nice… _dragon boobies… I'd like that…_"

"You're so close, my friend. So so close…"

"….h-how….?" The Fallen frowned and closed his eyes, forcing himself to just stay still and breathe. He was still seeing blades falling and swiping inside his eyelids. "….Conscience… I feel like I'm dying…"

"You know what dying feels like, and this isn't it." Conscience knelt and dusted his breastplate off, clicking his tongue at the rent torn through the left breast. "This is probably one of the most anticlimactic places you could give up."

"…T-This city… is infested…" The Fallen whispered. "…N-No matter how many survivors…. I save…. you and I both know that it…. it isn't _enough._"

"It _is_ enough." Conscience smiled, jabbing a thumb at the sky. "You've got _them._"

"Fallen!"

Spyra landed, claws clicking on the wall as she bounded over and gripped his flank, making him wince.

"Fallen, are you hurt?" She cried. Ignitia landed just behind her, cautiously stepping closer with that same, shocked expression still on her face. "Talk to me, man!"

"…Not hurt…" He wheezed. "….just… _tired…_"

"The main battalion is assaulting the castle…" Ignitia swallowed, glancing over the back of the wall towards Crownhorn over the small sea of rooftops. "Why didn't you go there, Fallen?"

"…_Survivors…_" He pointed at the other side of the city, to another section of wall. "…_Trapped… _remnants on the walls… was gathering… response force…"

"That's a good idea." Spyra glanced back at her. "If the main square fell and some of the guys there didn't get whacked, we could mass the survivors and use them in the final push."

"Then _that_ is our job." Ignitia spread her wings again. "You are uninjured, Fallen?"

"…yeah." He forced himself to sit up, sounding like a teetering tree as he slowly rose, gripping Spyra's wings for support. "…I'm okay. Let's go."

"Woah, no way, dude, you look like you're about to pass out. I'd say, uh…" Spyra grinned at some of the bodies. "…you did pretty good for today. Let the girls handle this one."

"_Together,_ this time." Ignitia smiled warmly, and then frowned again. "…Despite whatever shame it might later entail… Fallen, collect yourself and make for the castle, the Dark Army is gathering in the courtyard and are trying to break down the main doors. If they get inside…"

"…That's where the population has been evacuated to." The Fallen finished for her, nodding as he stood up on shaking legs. "They won't have enough soldiers inside to stop them. If they get through the doors, all of Oversight will be slaughtered."

"How many units did you find?" Spyra stepped back. "Gimme' a rundown, Fallen, what we got to work with."

"Maybe a hundred? I didn't count." He pointed back towards the gates. "Three or four officers. It isn't enough. The detachment outside the castle is double that. I was only able to get that vague amount, and some names out of the prisoners I found…"

"Prisoners?" Spyra glanced around. "What prisoners?"

"Indeed." He tiredly smiled. She laughed.

"We'll gather the remainder of the soldiers, and I'll direct them for the castle. Spyra-" Ignitia paused, but remained resolute. "-the moment we liberate the last of the survivors, head to the castle ahead of us, so you can buy the defenders some time. Use everything you have."

"You got it!" Spyra wagged her tail. "The Fallen can take the streets, maybe by the time he gets there, he'll have recovered some."

"…I'm _fine._" He shook his head. "Enough talking, both of you, we have to move quickly."

"Good luck, Fallen." Ignitia lifted off. "-We'll talk about those _hands of yours_ later…"

"Yeah, you're in trouble, by the way." Spyra smirked. "I reckon all three of us have some dirt we gotta' talk about when and _if _we get out of this in one piece. Oh, and P.S: I still hate your guts. Anyway, buh-bye now…"

She vanished into the sky with a burst of wind. The Fallen watched them both go, snickered, and started limping for the stairs.

"…Let's hope I don't take a tumble…"

He tripped four down and landed on his face.

It was a good thing he had solid armor…

* * *

{🐉}


	33. Chapter 32 - The Battle for Oversight

**Dragon(s)layer**

**32**

* * *

**The Battle for Oversight**

* * *

Ignitia didn't know whether or not she was angry.

She kind of _was_ about certain things.

But mostly she was caught in a sort of shell-shock over everything that had happened. When was the last time she could remember _ever_ losing control? Much less to the point of not recalling a full-fledged duel with the Purple Dragon of legend?

She'd never felt this insecure in her entire life.

But at the same time, she'd also never felt this _excited._

"_Get behind me! Go! Pull back!_" The Guardian cried, bounding forwards and gesturing with her orange wing. Mole infantrymen bustled past her, shouldering or carrying their wounded as they went. "Form up on me!"

"Guardian! On the roof!" A Mole howled.

There was a rush of flame and a crack of bone. A pair of Orcs tumbled from atop a nearby commonhouse aflame and crunched onto the street as two blackened mounds. The air rushed, and a purple bullet zippes between the rooftops at blindingly fast speeds.

"Gods, she's fast!" Another soldier gasped.

"Assemble the remainder of your infantry in fighting condition at the end of the street, you're to kill any who get past us." Ignitia spread her wings and snarled, her hips wiggling like a preparing cat's. "Go now, please!"

She leaped over the Mole's head and tackled an Orc to the street right behind him, tearing his throat out with her claw and summarily pulping his head with a heel.

Spyra whipped over the intersection and a bolt of lightning careened into a cluster of Grublins. The monsters that hadn't instantly died were still screaming when the purple dragoness swung around and landed on the Orc who was leading them. She sprawled on his pauldrons from behind and blasted a jet of pure streamed flame right into the open rear of the creature's helmet. The Orc looked like a living suit of flaming armor for an instant before it shriveled and collapsed.

"I'm on thirty-eight!" Spyra cackled, rolling past Ignitia's flank and slashing a Grublin's face open. "-And I'm _still_ not seein' the grind, Ignitia!"

"I'll show you grind!" The Guardian laughed. "I've been fighting much longer than you have, little one, beware whom you test."

"Lotsa' chatter, baby!" Spyra's wings whipped all around her form, sending a squad of Grublins flipping away in all directions. She took advantage of all who fell prone by bathing them in fire. "You wanna' take care of that guy for me? I got my claws full."

Ignitia completed a low rotation go her paws, her tail becoming a buzzsaw that scythed down several fighters in a clearcut cone-path down the street. She righted herself, a ball of flame shooting from her puckered chops and vaporizing an Orc peppering them with a crossbow from behind a storefront.

There were still so many of them, though...

"Isn't Urukal's main force gathering outside the castle?" Spyra called, slashing, blocking blows with her wings and igniting Grublins on the flanks. "I feel like we're fighting his whole fuckin' army out here!"

"Probably a quarter of Urukal's men are scattered around the city!" Ignitia shouted back. She barely dodged the business-end of a glaive, reaching down to grab the leg of the offending Orc. She swung about and threw him like he sported the weight of a feather. The Orc flipped and ended his journey impaled on a decorative brass protrusion of one of the buildings. "But I think if we-"

The front of a commonhouse suddenly was vaporized in a violent burst of debris and crumbling brickwork. The blast sent Spyra reeling and forced Ignitia to take cover behind a pair of abandoned carriages. The shingles making the building's roof sounded like some kind of deranged xylophone as they fell into the crater en masse and clambered around the rubble.

When the smoke was barely cleared, a towering figure stomped through the refuse and into the street. It stood almost eight feet tall, and had the guttural squeal of a pig for its voice.

Ignitia gasped and peered around the carriage.

"_Jeez'_, you are one ugly fucker!" Spyra cringed, backing away and spreading her wings defensively. The creature shrieked and raised a Morningstar bigger than her whole body over its gnarly head. "Nice threads, dude, what do they call ya'? _Crusher?_"

"_Spyra, get away from it!_" Ignitia cried. "It's an OgreOrc!"

The street exploded in her face and barred her from reaching the purple dragon. Ignitia snarled and leaped back for safety from a second OgreOrc lumbering out from behind the first one. It ripped its massive Morningstar out of the street and patted the haft in its other claw as it stalked towards her.

"…I-I admit… the confidence wavers when it's right in yer' face." Spyra swallowed, her horns practically wilting like rabbit ears as the monster's shadow fell over her. "-_Oh my god, look! _It's Cynder! And is she- is she _bending over?_"

The OgreOrc stopped dead and glanced over to follow her talon.

Spyra gawked.

"_What the fuck?! Even the _Orcs_ have a hard-on for her?!_" She opened her mouth and bolts of electricity singed into the monster's chest and arm, sending it stumbling. "_Fuck her _and _you people!_"

The Orc squealed piggishly and brought the spiked head down. Spyra zipped between its legs and the street cracked under the impact. She spun around and bathed the monster's rear end and back in searing flames. The OgreOrc screamed and threw itself around with a counter strike.

Spyra nearly lost her head, cutting off her stream and hugging the street as the Morningstar whistled right over her horns.

_Good dodge-_

The OgreOrc kicked her in the head. She tried to catch her flight with her wings, but ended her descent into a market stall before she could manage it. Wood snapped and the counter and uphaft came apart under her back. The tarp concealing the sunspace delicately settled over her and descended her world into darkness.

_"Ouch._" –She brooded, muffled.

Nearby, Ignitia was engaged in a series of vicious back-forths with the Orc's companion. She caught the claw holding the Morningstar in both forepaws in a thundering clap of scale and moss-flesh, dousing the OgreOrc's chest in flames from her screaming maw. The Orc shrieked and punched her across the cheek a total of four times until she lost her grip on his weapon-arm. The opponents staggered back and came at one another again a moment later.

Ignitia swept under the Orc's attacking swings and ran her horns to the cranium through its belly with a sickening crunch, twisting free and vaulting into the air in one movement. She plucked her rear paws over the Dark creature's face, flapped her wings and strained against the weight as she lifted it off the street.

With an angry roar, Ignitia corkscrewed her own body and stalled the spin with her wide membrane-span suddenly. The OgreOrc became a bodily blur- like it was a propeller blade –before it snapped free of her talons, flew almost thirty feet, and caved in the front of a first-floor building when it hit the wall in a blast of dust.

The Guardian landed with an enraged snort and fumed.

She was _not_ in the mood.

"_Spyra!_" She stood upright the moment her gaze crossed the street.

"_I got this!_" The purple heroine cried.

The OgreOrc still standing suddenly jolted, and a meteorite burst out the back of its torso with a spray of singing viscera and charred chunks. The glowing ball of fire hit the street, flashed to nothingness, and revealed Spyra, who had been its core.

The towering monstrosity thundered the intersection as it fell to its knees and then on its face, dead and steaming.

"I ain't gonna' lie," Spyra breathed as Ignitia trotted over. "me and the Fallen make a better team, but still: that was badass."

"You did well." Ignitia leaned down and snout-nudged her. "Speaking of the Fallen, he's probably close to the castle courtyard. You should gain some altitude and scout out the enemy formation, see what they're up to before the two of you just dive in."

"Sounds radical. I'm on it." Spyra grunted. "Y'know, you didn't do half bad yourself, grams'…"

Ignitia clicked her tongue in gall and glanced at the still smoking building-crater the other OgreOrc was lying dead in.

"I'm yukkin, Ignitia. You're badass too." Spyra bumped her with her fist and spread her wings. "I should be able to spot the Fallen from up there too. We'll regroup and start up the killin' machine. What are you gonna' do?"

"I'll finish cleaning out this block, and then I'll rally the new force we've assembled and lead them in a flanking attack once you and the Fallen engage." Ignitia nodded. "If I know Terradora, and I _do,_ she's probably out here somewhere, most likely by herself, venting frustrations on wandering Grublin scavengers and Orc patrols. Maybe one of us will run into her."

"But she'll definitely show up for the courtyard battle, right?"

"Terradora hasn't passed up the opportunity for a fight in her entire life." Ignitia chuckled. "Now get a move on, Spyra."

"_Hey! _Look! More Wyverns! Are you sure you got this?" Spyra wing-pointed between the rooftops.

"I can handle Wyverns!" Ignitia laughed, turning around and spreading into a combat stance. "It's probably another patrol left over from-"

The color from Ignitia's face drained.

"Fly."

"Wait, huh?"

"_Fly!_"

The Guardian whipped Spyra away with her tail and didn't stop hollering until the younger dragon zipped into the sky, a concerned look splayed all down her snout.

* * *

_**{Ace Combat 7 OST: Rescue}**_

* * *

Ignitia grimly folded her wings and planted her paws.

It was no use trying to gain the high-ground outnumbered like this. For dragons, the duels were only established by who could be quicker and more precise, and it was usually the defender who chose the theater of air or ground.

_Focus on me, focus on me, the Guardian, I'm a Guardian! You sick outcasts can't resist that, can you?_

She splayed her iconic wingspan out as far as it could go, and the specks in the sky immediately altered course.

Without much time for preparation, those specks quickly grew to the size of her claws.

_Then,_ they were on top of her.

Ignitia opened her mouth and let loose a challenging roar. Another bellow answered her as a dark, sinewy shape smashed into the street and sprinted at her like a feral predatory cat.

Her opponent screamed like a psychopath and sprung, colliding with her breast with enough force to rattle bones. The Guardian felt the cobblestone part from her shoulders as she was dragged backward with the enemy mounted atop her. She snarled, clawing, slashing and biting, eventually getting a good blow in on the throat.

She hooked her fangs into the softer belly-flesh and used her feet to tear the barb free. She tasted blood, _red_ blood, not black.

Rolling in the air from the blow, a black, serpentine dragon landed in a blast of debris ahead of her, dark limbs flailing and kicking as it clawed at its bleeding throat.

As soon as Ignitia righted herself, her enemy sprung to his heels and spread a pair of wings black as ink, bellowing at her with a shrill voice tuned through a harsh lifestyle that valued the survival of the fittest.

"Keep your displays, _Glower!_" Ignitia barked. "We don't need introductions from murderers."

"The only hen guilty of murder is _you,_ False Fire!" Glower screeched. The cloudy daylight almost seemed to be sucked in and swallowed by his impossibly dark body. It was as if his scales were a void that could be used to see into the darkest of nights.

It was why his kind had the name that they did.

_Night Dragons._

"You're too late, Guardian! The Mistress has seen through your schemes!" Glower stalked closer, the street rumbling as one, two, three, and finally, _four_ other dark reptiles landed at his flanks. "Might you make this easy, and bear your throat?"

"Frankly, Glower, it baffles me that Malefora was willing to let you off the leash Cynder had on you, given your… _less than shining_ record of command."

Glower snarled, nodding for two of the other Night Dragons in his Wing to take her flank.

"That was an old time and an old squad." He snapped. "But! Forgetting the past, sister, what is the news I hear of the _Purple Dragon_ being in Oversight? I'd very much like to meet him…"

"You will not _touch her._" Ignitia spread her wings and hunched lower. "And you will not touch this city."

"_Oh _isn't that heroic of you?!" Glower screamed, quivering with hateful rage. He fanned his wings, and his Night Dragons leaped into action. "_I want one of you to eat her fucking eyes!_"

A narrow-snouted drake was the first to make contact. Ignitia locked forepaws with him and endured the strike of a serrated tailblade located at his fifth limb's tip. The Night Dragon snarled and tried to lean his weight with a spread of his own wings.

Ignitia twisted down and vaulted him over her shoulder head-first into the street.

Another dragon tried to dig his fangs into her wing. She snapped backward and caught his chin with an upwards swing of her tail, finishing her flank with her paw drawing a trio of bloody lines down his breast. She bit him across the face and craned her neck so she could hurl him like a sack of potatoes into a buttress on the side of the road.

Her flesh suddenly began to bloom with indescribable pain, and a moment later, Ignitia was blind. All she could hear was the scream of an angry wyrm over the flow of Mana.

She tucked and rolled with an agonized shriek, bursting from the cone of Shadowfire covered in unnatural blisters and steam. She sent the offender into the air when a fireball imploded under his heels. The drake she'd face-planted came back and straddled her from behind, his talons raking a duo of gory trenches down her snout and another three across her neck. Another Night Dragon landed in front of her and galloped at her with her own black horns presented.

Ignitia screamed, twisting, to adjust the inevitable blow away from her clavicle. The Night Dragoness' horn instead impaled her shoulderblade and ran nearly to the halfway ring. The Guardian felt her own blood running like a lukewarm river down her flank and onto the street.

She writhed like a snake and sent the bitch-hen reeling with a bat of her sharp wing across the face. Ignitia threw her whole weight into the air and tossed the startled drake off her spine.

The Guardian looped mid-fall and latched onto his belly, swinging him around and using him as a bed to shield her crushing fall back down to the road.

**_Crasshhhhh~! _**–the street cracked and bricks flew everywhere. The Night drake she straddled peeled his head out of the rubble and screamed at her defiantly, broiling green Poison energies swirling in the back of his throat.

Ignitia swatted away a rescue attempt from one of his comrades with her tail, and gripped her victim's snout and mandible in both forepaws.

What followed next appeared to look like Ignitia was about to lock jaws with the Night Dragon in some obscene kiss. Instead, the Fire Guardian kept their throats aligned as a jet of terrible flame shot out from her gullet and penetrated the back of the drake's throat.

She kept the stream flowing until the body beneath her stopped struggling. The Night Dragon's face started to slide off his own skull. His eyes vanished in puffs of steam and were replaced with amber-glowing portcullises. The back of his once regal neck liquefied and became part of the cobblestone.

Ignitia did not cut off the fiery scream until another moment before silencing her Mana and tearing back, the melting head and spinal column of her opponent ripping free from his glowing, magma-like shoulders like one would pull a foreign object out of fresh baking batter.

The Guardian threw the slag away before Glower himself tackled her from the side and assailed her with a series of slashes and bites, riddling Ignitia's shoulder and ribs viciously like he was a starving dog tearing into a slab of meat.

Ignitia could only cry out in hateful defiance as the rest of the Wing of the dragon she'd murdered pounced on her as a pack.

They were going to draw and quarter her with their teeth.

Then, one of the Night Dragons went still and _squeaked,_ like a mouse.

All motions ceased.

That same drake had a look of horror written across his black snout. He was yanked back suddenly by some extremely powerful force, causing the whole Wing to leap back in surprise and leave Ignitia a bleeding wreck in the street.

"_Watch:_" Terradora's voice bellowed across the whole intersection. "witness all of your fates at my claw."

The massive Earth Guardian regarded the kicking and flailing lizard that was a head shorter than her with disdain. She was standing on her rear paws and holding the Night Dragon, suspended, like he weighed nothing, her talons wrapped around his throat.

Without another word, Terradora gripped one of the drake's black horns, and snapped it free of his skull with a sickening crunch of flesh and bone. The Night Dragon screamed at the top of his lungs as blood rolled down his head and began to coat his already dark body.

The Earth Guardian spiraled the horn in her other claw like it was a dagger before ramming it point-first through her victim's eye, twisting when the shrieks doubled in volume, and jerking it around until they became silent and the reptile's form swung from her grip limply.

She spat in the corpse's face and threw it at Glower's feet, making him and his remaining Wing leap back in fright.

"Let us fight now." Terradora said sternly.

The Night Dragons scattered into the air in a hasty retreat, like a flock of panicking pigeons.

Wingleader Glower took a moment to regard the bleeding form of Ignitia with some measure of grim disappointment.

_So close._

_Next time._

He spread his wings too and went after his squad, back over Oversight's walls and into the heavens beyond.

"…_s-sister…_"

"Ignitia!" Terradora held onto the Fire Guardian's flank and rolled her onto her back, examining the brutal damage wrought up and down her usually beautiful body. "You are in bad shape."

"…_ecck, I f-felt that before you said so, Terra'…_" Ignitia wobbled in her grip as the Earth Guardian hauled her weight.

Very soon, Terradora had her slung over her back, and she began to gallop down the street, unaffected at all by the Guardian of Fire's weight as the chord-like muscles streaming down her emerald scales rippled and flexed.

Truly, Terradora had become a powerful warrioress over the years. Ignitia felt like she was lying on steel.

"The Night Dragons have only recently joined the fray." Terradora breathed over her wing as they went. "That's the third Wing of their banner that has infiltrated the city at various times. Malefora has unleashed their full ranks, I think."

"…_if the Night Dragons have become active, that means Malefora herself is coming as well…_" said Ignitia weakly. "…_Terra'… I… I brought her… she's headed for the castle…_"

"Who?"

"_The Purple Dragoness_." Ignitia paused, cringing as blood ran down her scales. She creased her chops and vainly tried to apply pressure to the shoulder-wound she sported with her claw. "…_her and the Fallen…_"

"Mm. Perfect. I may exact penance on that one." Terradora smirked darkly. "Urukal has gathered all his remaining forces inside the city. He's mustering them outside Crownhorn's courtyard and is about to assault the gates."

"…best speed then." Ignitia cried out in agony, holding onto her fellow Guardian's shoulders and twisting around so that her belly ran parallel to Terradora's spinal scutes. "…What about the Queen?"

"I'd have crushed her like the insect she is if our laws allowed it." Terradora rumbled, her wings unfurling and spreading on either of her sides. "I do not think Oversight could take another blow to its morale. But to answer your question: she is as useless as she was during the blizzard incident between you and Cynder."

"…Oh…" Ignitia closed her eyes, suffering terrible pain. "…That's a long time to be useless…. Yes…."

"Mm." Terradora heaved, taking her own and Ignitia's weight in stride, and lifting off the street with a creak of leathery membranes. Ignitia heard the wind whistling but couldn't keep her eyes open to see for herself. "By the way: it is good to see you."

Ignitia would've laughed, but she fell asleep before she could.

* * *

{🐉}

Terradora almost smashed straight through the window. It was by luck or chance that Blizren was there to yank the sills apart and leap out of the way before that happened.

"Guardian Ignitia!" He squawked upon seeing Terradora stand herself up.

"Gather everyone." Terradora snapped, carrying her friend across the chamber. "One of you: find a capable flyer not in this room."

"…Terra', you know I'm not one to prod panic, but…" Ignitia coughed when she was heaved onto a cot, and a Fire drake with golden horns scurried over to apply a dressing over the gushing wound on her shoulder. "…I-I feel like it's crucial to let you know…"

"Out with it." Terradora grunted, tearing parchment and pressing a prepared Red Mana Crystal onto Ignitia's flank. The latter winced in the resultant flash.

"-I can't feel my chest."

"Gather _everyone._" Terradora practically threw one of the other dragons scrambling around the chamber. "What the hell are you all doing? Move faster!"

"Don't forget about the survivors." Ignitia heaved. "The remnant battalions waiting by the gates."

"I will lead them." The Earth Guardian touched their foreheads, a rare chip of strain marring her stoic expression. "Then I will find the Purple Dragon."

"-And the Fallen, don't forget him either."

"How could I _not._" Terradora rolled her eyes. "Besides, if they are as close as you have described them as, they cannot be too far apart."

"I don't mean to interrupt, ma'ams." Blizren stepped to the side of the cot. "But do you have standing orders?"

"Take whatever is left of your Wing and merge with the rest of the defenders." Terradora regarded him for only a second. "Try to keep to the air. I have been told by our scouts that Urukal himself is leading the charge. The melee is going to be overwhelming."

"-Spyra and the Fallen won't even flinch at that!" Ignitia cried, almost rolling out of the cot before others hurried over and steadied her with their paws. "Terradora, you have to find them!"

"I only have two wings." Terradora grumbled. "Find more crystals, somebody!"

"But the medical wing with all of the wounded..." A dragon blinked.

"I do not _care._ Get more crystal-"

"I'm ordering you to not listen to Terradora." Ignitia winced, ignoring the resultant gawking glare of the prior. "Just patch me up, please."

"Damn it Ignitia-"

"I can't survive losing that dragoness _again,_ so if you want me to recover, get your scaly ass out of that window and back into the fight!" The Fire Guardian shrieked.

"Sergeant Colcrus was able to reassemble another Wing, ma'ams, they're waiting for your orders as well." Another drake announced.

"Fuck off." Terradora snapped before leaning over Ignitia. "Consider the value of different lives here, sister. Keeping one who can operate a broom is not over keeping one who can with a _sword._"

"I will be dead before I endanger others for my own sake." Ignitia snarled, angling her head painfully over so she could gaze at the messenger. "And, _Sergeant_ Colcrus?"

"Recently promoted." The messenger grimly frowned. "On account of the casualties recently suffered."

"…Oh, Ancestors." Ignita let her head hit the cot's pillow. "Terradora, please just go. If you don't move, the lives of every being in Oversight could be in jeapordy."

"_I'm _supposed to be the hardheaded one." Terradora locked foreheads with her again. "_Damn it, Ignitia. I wish you were colder sometimes, like me._"

"_Cyrila's_ the cold one." Ignitia giggled. "Now please, hurry!"

"The dark armies are moving!" Someone shouted, clawsteps echoing out from a nearby hall as messengers returned from the streets outside. "-And the Purple Dragon and Fallen are emerging out of the central district and are coming here!"

"This campaign is about to culminate in a major battle." Terradora growled as she stomped back over to the window and ripped it open. "I will bring the reinforcements. After that, it is time for this heroine to prove her worth to not just the Dragon Realms, but to _me._"

* * *

{🐉}

This was all new to her, obviously. Swamp-life never required aerial reconnaissance simply because it couldn't be used. Whenever Spyra had flown over the bogs, the mist, woodland canopies and mushroom-tree caps would obscure everything below her.

Oversight was completely different. Everything was organized into these neat channels. Alleyways, streets and squares, all snug between trench-like caps created between tightly wound stone and shingle buildings. Unless someone hid inside a structure or under some of the wharf overlofts, it was impossible to not be spotted.

Evidently, the Dark Army in Oversight's heart had considered themselves victors already.

They certainly weren't making an effort to keep themselves subtle.

Spyra liked a good fight…

But this seemed suicidal.

The stringent forces her, Ignitia and the Fallen had wiped out outside the walls, and the straggling units that had entrapped their allied survivors paled in numbers when put up against the final mob.

It was true, Urukal (wherever he was down there) was amassing all of his infantry in a burning market square not too far from the courtyard directly in front of the gates to Castle Crownhorn: the only way to easily breach the castle without having to spend days pummeling through solid stone.

There were thousands of Grublins, so many that they looked like moving carpets of little ant people scurrying around the ankles of platoons of Orc infantry and clusters of Trolls. Spyra tried to stay over the formation for a while to get a somewhat accurate estimate of ranks.

She wanted to say between fifteen-hundred and two-thousand.

She lost count when a trio of patrolling Wyverns engaged and tried to claw her face off, effectively ruining her internal counting. After butchering them, Spyra took off towards the heart of the city, now scanning the ruined streets for the _Fallen._

Between her sweeps, she massacred any stragglers she came across. A handful of Grublins picking at the remains of a butcher's shop, a trio of Orcs and their lapdogs wandering towards the gathering down a sideroad.

It all felt relatively easy.

After all, the Fallen was pretty easy to track.

She just had to follow all the bodies she didn't make.

When she found him, the human was sitting on the remains of a stoop, his helm was removed and lain next to his weapons at his feet. He had his face buried in his hands, fingers clawing through his matted hair. Spyra had never before seen him so covered in blood. He looked black, like tar. There was that much of it.

"_Hey,_ what're ya' doin'?" She breathed, claws clicking as she landed in front of him and folded up her wings. He didn't immediately answer her. Spyra swept her snout around and observed a cluster of Orcs and Grublins he'd slain. There was a massive OgreOrc missing a hand and with its entrails decorating the street slumped over curb. "…Looks like _you_ had a good fight."

The Fallen just shivered. For a long while, Spyra gazed upon the top of his head and doted on him, tempted but refusing to touch him.

"…Did, uh… didjya' get hurt or something?" She coughed, wiping some sweat off her brow and polishing a horn with her thumb. "I've kinda' been the one giving you the silent treatment and all that the last day or two, so, y'know, it's a little weird having it done back. Especially now. …Are we going to the castle? Ignitia's gathering the soldiers we saved."

The human slid his hands away and revealed to her a sunken face. He looked like he had aged over the last few hours. She supposed that was expected, given the fact that they had rapidly secured the fringes of a whole city, in fights that would've taken normal armies days.

Though, that was all against _remnants._

As it turned out, Urukal had put all of his cards into bull-rushing the castle, and they were just in time for the _real_ fight. The city was still infested, on top of that. The cries of angry Orcs were caught on the wind from all directions in the distance. Something exploded a few blocks away and Mole rifles were cracking in the direction of the castle, looming over the rooftops like a pristine watcher over all the destruction.

"The castle's outta' range for all the siege weapons outside. No wonder it's practically untouched like that, the Dark Army is just gettin' to claw it up _now_ after the whole battle." She muttered, sitting in front of the Fallen and lapping at one of her paws. "You do gotta' give it to these Northern-peeps, they fight alright, not as good as us, but alright…"

"Are you talking to me again?"

Spyra blinked and met his gaze. The Fallen looked terrible. They both did, but it made him look worse. The beautiful suit of armor the Moles had given him was utterly ruined. Battle damage scarred every inch of it, most of the scale-mail was gone and the pauldrons had been almost completely shorn away, like they were made of paper and someone had slashed them with a tiger's paw.

He was covered in lacerations and bruises. Nothing had cut too deeply, thankfully, and that went for both of them. The worst she was dealing with was a developing black eye from that son of a bitch OgreOrc's foot in the intersection, and mad blood-blisters. She still had the energy and vigor to keep fighting, like her normal peppy self.

But this…

"…Are you talking to me again?" He asked a second time.

"I don't know yet." She turned away and huffed at her feet, kicking a pebble. "…It felt weird last night, not having you there. I know it hasn't been that long, but, like… it's hard for me to sleep without the weight against my flank, and… and _shit._"

"So then come back." He croaked, wiping blood off his cheek.

"What, ya' _want_ me to?" Spyra grumbled.

"Of course I want you to."

"I hate the fact sometimes, that you're the person I-"

He held up a hand in front of her snout, keeping it off her chops because of all the mud and gore. The Fallen smiled and shook his head.

"Please," He muttered. "please don't say that."

"…S-Say what…." Spyra suddenly felt her composure becoming brittle. She clenched her fangs when her lower jaw quivered and stayed strong. "…_Why?_"

"Because you shouldn't."

"Yeah? Why the hell not? I can say whatever I want to whoever I want." The dragon whipped her tail. "I could have anyone!"

"You could." He conceded. "I never wanted your prerogative, Spyra, just you."

"So then why can't I say it? Huh?" She got in his face. "Do you really not care, that at any friggin' second, _right now,_ in this hell-hole, one of us could be dead?"

"That's _exactly_ why you shouldn't say it." He forced himself to stand up and slip his helmet back onto his filthy head. When he breathed, it came out as a shiver. He grabbed his blade and gun and sheathed them. "Look, fate's got us on the chopping block right now, and to your word: there could be a moment right in the middle of my sentence where I'm finally set free, and you can save the world. But just so we're clear: if it means I can keep you alive, my own well being is forfeit."

"T-That's _exactly_ why I want to say it!" She cried. "God damn it, Fallen! I'm not a confused little hatchling, alright? I know how I feel! I've had too hard a life to not learn how to tell truth, from worthless in-the-moment emotion!"

"_Listen to me._" He knelt, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "Look at me. You have every right to leave me behind. I have no right to lay any sort of claim to anything about or upon you. I don't want you to say anything to me, not about _that. _You only stand to lose and never gain from this from that moment on when the words leave your mouth."

"b-but-" Spyra started crying. She held onto his wrists and wrung her paws on the bloodstained metal of his gauntlets. "-_I-I never sa-id y-ou had t-to accept it-_"

"The last time someone said that to me, I-!"

"_Wait!"_

The Fallen looked up at a rooftop.

Conscience was standing there, chin down, now similarly beaten, bloodied and ruined just like he was. However, his expression always maintained that calm aloofness, just as it was now, albeit with a slight sprinkle of sadness.

"Fallen," His other folded his arms. "just be _sure._ Once you tell someone, there isn't any going back."

"….I…" The Fallen swallowed. "I know."

"_w-what-?_" Spyra sobbed, bowing her head so she didn't have to look at him.

"Spyra, please, look at me." He delicately lifted her chin. "What I _need_ from you, is for you to focus on getting through whatever happens today. No matter what. You must _live._ Do you understand?"

The purple dragon sniffled and touched her forehead to his despite all the gore and detritus. She ground her scales into his hair, missing how it felt on her snout.

"….Hey…" The Fallen tiredly grinned. "-isn't that Comet Festival tomorrow night?"

Spyra sat back, blinked, and then scoffed before rubbing at her eyes again.

"_Who cares about the stupid festival._" She pouted. "I'm in the middle of a fucking warzone being told _no_ by you, and I'm _listening._"

"Those fireworks that they're going to use are for _you._" He smiled. "So you can't miss them."

"What? B-But they aren-"

He rubbed her neck and stood up.

"We gotta' get you to your own fireworks." He nodded. "C'mon, I know you're angry with me, but for the times we had in the swamp's sake: let's save a castle."

"…A-And fuck up a load of bad-guys while we're at it?" She hiccupped laughter.

"A _huge_ load of bad-guys."

"I'm game."

* * *

{🐉}

"There's someone coming!"

"More fallback survivors?"

"No! It's the Purple Dragon and the Fallen!"

The Moles and dragons in the battlements defending the gates couldn't have looked more relieved.

Taking into consideration their situation: neither Spyra nor the Fallen could blame them.

Crownhorn Courtyard had six individual streets it led out into. A great statue of a masterfully carved stone tree riddled with vines lye shattered in the center of the plaza, and craters speckled most of the buildings in the direction of the city-gates from artillery fire.

The walls were staffed with Moles wielding rifles and polearms. There were two brass, mechanically-mounted cannons facing the courtyard below on either end of the forward-facing walls flanking the massive wooden, brass-barred gates, which were carved with murals of vines and rose thorns in deep umber relief.

Dragons organized into mixed Wings waited to begin aerial sweeps on the walls and from the taller spires of the castle proper. A contingent of Mole pikemen had assembled in front of the gates to mount a last-ditch ground defensive with overhead support. The Fallen and Spyra opted to stand among _them_ and not on the walls, despite many of the officers and some of the dragons suggesting otherwise.

"I'm not putting anyone between me and them." The Fallen said.

"Ditto." Spyra smirked.

"Guardian Terradora left a few hours ago and still hasn't returned as far as we know." The Mole captain said as he strode with them to the front of the pikemen line. "What if Cynder's gotten her too?"

"I don't think so." Spyra shook her head. "If Goth-slut was here, we would've noticed, and she'd had to have taken on Ignitia _and_ Terradora at once. Even she couldn't manage that."

"Terradora and Ignitia probably linked up somewhere in the city and are organizing the forces by the gates." The Fallen nodded. "We have to hold out long enough, and draw the Dark Army in so they can hit from behind."

"My men are ready." The captain looked up at the taller human. "We'll stand by the Purple Dragon, and an _alien,_ especially if you've both done half the things I've heard you have."

"Brutha': get ready to be _amazed._" Spyra snickered. She hip-bumped the Fallen. "Best-a' luck out there, stud."

"Stay close." The Fallen winked.

"Yeahyeahyeah, I know… and, ehm…" Spyra wandered a bit closer, her voice falling to a whisper. "…about earlier, just lemme' say one thing:"

"Yes?"

"If you die, I'll fuckin' kill you." She nipped at his arm and giggled. "Besides, I need some more incentive and shit if I'm gonna' forgive ya'."

"Maybe I'll save you in the following moments from a near-death experience?"

"Or you'll trip on a Grublin and smash your face in the brickwork, and it'll be so funny that I'll _have_ to start liking ya' again." The dragoness stretched her wings. "You never know, huh?"

"They're coming!" One of the Moles pointed at the sky. A pair of dragons flew overhead, giving claw-signals as they returned from scouting over the streets. "The Dark Army's mobilized!"

"It's about time." The Fallen grunted, looking down at his wrecked armor. "…Somebody's gonna' get their ass kicked for what they did to my new suit."

"The battle-wear fits ya'." Spyra grinned. "Makes you look all badass and weathered and stuff. Hens dig the tough ones."

"I'll flex with every Orc I kill and make you swoon."

_You already did that, _she sheepishly thought, wishing he had let her say what she wanted to earlier.

The sound of massed marching and the screams of beasts echoed through the air. The city ahead seemed to tremble beneath the duress of a thousand heels. Three of the streets ahead began to slightly jitter as things crawled out of the shadows cast by the commonhouse rows.

Then, the first blackened creatures began to stride across the massive courtyard. The rising cry of hundreds of ragged throats bellowed out into the air.

Even the Fallen shifted on his heels as the square began to flood with moving tar.

Thousands and thousands of Grublins and Orcs. Tens of Trolls. The rush was colossal and seemingly endless, and it was happening so fast.

He and Spyra glanced at one another and settled on their heels, breathing, trying to keep their nerves from completely rattling.

The cannons on the walls started belching, and the riflemen's guns cracking. Detonations of fire erupted in the hordes, killing scores, felling a Troll, but ultimately even the flames were swallowed in the sheer mass of bodies.

"-_Advance!_" –Came a deep, thundering voice that bounced across the whole block. Spyra and the Fallen squinted, and saw on the roof of one of the buildings across the square, an Orc had appeared standing on the shingles, raising a two-handed, double-sided axe into the air. There was a black, ragged banner flowing from a pole stringed with dragon bones protruding from the back of his cuirass several feet into the air. Tusks splayed in a set of six from the sides of his finned helmet, and his stature was positively massive, rivaling that of an OgreOrc. "_Tear down the Northerner's puny gates, and kill every single thing inside that castle! Leave no one alive!_"

"Urukal?" Spyra glanced at the Fallen.

"Urukal." He sneered.

Who the hell _else_ could it be?

"_Arms!_" The captain screamed. The Moles shifted and a row of pikes lowered in a prepared wall. They couldn't have numbered more than a hundred either way.

A hundred and two against two thousand.

The Fallen gripped his gladius until his knuckles went white.

Before he knew what was happening, he had sprinted past the last of the outstretched pikes.

He cried out his challenge as loud as he could, sword high over his head, the massed of Dark infantry converging into an arrowhead to meet him halfway. Spyra's voice bellowed out beside him as the Purple Dragon galloped alongside his flank, fangs bore, flames whipping from her mouth.

"_Charge~!_" Urukal's echoing voice strained over the cacophony of chaos in the background.

The Fallen vaulted off the street and hurled himself at a wall of Orcs and Grublins, a monstrous Troll stampeding towards their backs and trampling some of its own allies to reach them.

Steel shrieked and flames screamed. He and Spyra landed in the heart of hell and began to fight for their lives.

Around them, Oversight burned as if it was eating itself from the gravity of their actions. The defense of Crownhorn had begun.

* * *

{🐉}

"Why _would_ she tell us that they were leaving in the first place?" Taliopia sulked, her expression appearing to melt and slide down her snout. She fiddled with her toe-talons and refused to look at the temple doors. "Spyra doesn't want anything to do with us anymore anyway."

"That's not true." Morinth answered with no conviction at all, her emerald gaze sweeping around the campus island. She was keeping up some unreasonable hope that the human and purple dragoness would simply appear around a corner, merrily chatting and going about their evening… "…What about Mr. Bugzee? Isn't he making you feel just a bit better?"

The black dragon gestured to the stuffed fox she had bought Taliopia earlier this morning. The bug-eyed little thing bulged, squished at the midsection as Taliopia hugged it until the point of the seams coming apart. Even though she didn't answer her, Morinth still saw the disappointment in the healer's eyes.

For a moment, Morinth thought about singing for her, but found her own mood too sour to work up the words. Instead, she plopped on the stoop of the Guardian Temple and kicked a stray piece of litter to watch it bounce around the cobblestone. She put a dark wing over Tali's set and sighed.

"We should go after them." Taliopia muttered.

Morinth looked at her like she was crazy.

She liked the suggestion, of course, but it was just hearing such a bold statement from her Tali-walli' was… well, _unlike her._ The Fallen had really helped get her out of that damned shell it seemed.

"You know all that will do is get you or me or both of us killed." Morinth grunted. "Trying to search a warzone for one person is like picking out a thumb of quartz in a mountain of sand. Forget all the Orcs trying to cut you to bits…"

"…I hate Orcs." Taliopia quivered, hugging her toy fox even tighter, its little button eyes glinted with mock agony from the childish attentions. "If the Fallen's already gone there, and so has Spyra and Lady Ignitia, then they had to have destroyed the Dark Army there, they just had to have."

"The Fallen is quite good at what he does." Morinth blushed, feeling a sensation in her thighs. "-_But,_ even he can't take on an entire army by himself and win that fast. You might get your wish, because the longer that fight goes on, the more likely we are to get deployed with the rest of the battalion to provide reinforcements."

"Isn't it your wish too?"

"It is." Morinth lapped at her horn. "But I have to keep _you_ safe too, my doctoring 'ness. We could get stabby-wabbed by jumping into a battle all willy-nilly… You don't want to get stabby-wabbed, do you?"

"N-No!" Taliopia squeezed the plushie and gawked at Morinth like a frightening hatchling. "But I don't want _Spyra_ and the _Fallen_ to get stabby-wabbed even more! Oh, _please_ Morri-poo', I can't take this! Let's go find them, please!"

"Tali'-"

Morinth shushed her when a young drake scrambled over with a wild look in his eyes. He was one of the campus assistants, judging by the canvas bag slouched over his hip and the little monocle over his eye.

"Is Lady Ignitia in there?" The drake screeched to a halt at the foot of the stoop, pointing frantically at Guardian Temple.

"No?" Morinth blinked. "Why, has something happened?"

"_Oh-no-!_" The drake yanked his horns and danced on his hinds. "I need Ignitia's help!"

"With what, sir? Maybe me and Tali' here could lend you a paw-"

"Someone got stuck in the well again!"

Before Morinth or Taliopia could blink, the intern spread his wings and zipped off into the center of the island, vanishing.

Morinth rolled her jaw and started teething on a knuckle.

"They're going to miss the fireworks tomorrow night…" Taliopia sadly uttered, turning her stuffed fox around and nuzzling its nose. "Spyra's never seen fireworks before… I just wish we could talk to them at least, and see if they're okay."

A look dawned on Morinth's face as she let her paw out of her mouth and looked back at the Guardian Temple, silently towering into the cloudy day sky above like some titanic sigil of draconic might.

"…Maybe we could." She smiled deviously. "Maybe we could talk to them."

"How?"

"The temple has a Vision-Pool in the basement catacombs! Don't you remember from the semesters we had during trials?"

"So what about some stupid, smelly pool anyhow…" Taliopia pouted. "They locked the temple up_ and_ we aren't allowed to use the Guardians' Vision Pools, Morri-poo, we'd get in trouble…"

"…_Ooooohh Talliiiii'….~_" Morinth sang, leaning closer. "Do you recall how long I had to spend telling you that jumping the Fallen's bones in the medical wing was a _good_ idea? And how much you said _no_ and _nu-uh,_ and then when we just went and did it…"

Taliopia shuddered and ground her backside into the stoop steps.

Oh, the feeling of the Fallen inside _that_ part of her had been…

"…I-I don't know, M-Morri'…" Taliopia began to shiver, licking at her fangs to lap up suddenly hyperactive rivulets of drool. "…I-It's dishonest…."

"What's the value of _honesty_, my love, when you can make the Fallen stick it in your-"

"_Okay! Okayokayokay let's do it!_" Tali' moaned, her creamy body undulating as she clawed at her rump and tried to squeeze her own cheeks. Any attempt to relive that little episode back in the castle had proven faulty for her. She needed _more. "_J-Just as long as I can have my own moment with the human, Morri'! Just as long as he can- ….–_stick it in my butt again…._~"

"Come on." Morinth grabbed her by the wing and yanked. "I know how to get inside-"

"_Daughter!_"

Morinth and Taliopia shrieked in fright and grabbed one another, the latter's stuffed fox falling down the stoop before her tail whipped out and curled around to smash it between them.

Coming across the square in a regal trot was Councilman Leetol, looking as stern and emotionless as he always did. Immediately, Morinth felt her spinal scutes prickle and her wings tingle.

It was easier for an inlaw to deal with a slight distaste.

But describing how Taliopia's parents felt about her relationship and partner as _distasteful_ was being generous. Morinth could still remember when Tali's mother had screamed at her, like she had murdered her daughter, not _kissed_ her in front of them.

_Oh joy…_

"There you are! I have been searching for you." Leetol said studiously, coming to a halt at the bottom of the stoop, his rose-colored eyes fixed on Tali'. "Well? Aren't you going to come down here and say hello to me?"

_You had _days_ to come to her yourself,_ Morinth immediately thought, venom dripping from the words. _And he's not even acknowledging me again. Pah._

"H-Hi, daddy…" Taliopia shyly smiled as she uncoiled from Morinth. "How are you?"

"Quite well, daughter, quite well, or as _well_ as this war can let me." Leetol angled his long neck down and put his face in front of her when she reached the bottom step, waiting for Taliopia to peck his cheekscales before reclining and not offering one himself. Morinth growled as she followed. "Your mother and I have made a reservation. We were fixing to buy you dinner in celebration of your successful campaign in the south."

"O-Oh. _Oh! _T-That sounds w-wonderful!" Taliopia immediately began to revert to her normal, timid self. She sat on her haunches and smiled at her father, eyes continuously darting to her flank where she heard Morinth sit down too. "-I-Is Morinth invited too?"

"Ah, yes, _Morinth._" Leetol (of course) frowned, and looked past his nose at the darker hen.

"_Hoowwww arrree yoouuuu~, _Leetol?" Morinth sang with a mocking grin. "You must have been quite busy the last two days. Cheeky that, I guess it's expected, since you're a Councilman and all."

"I think both of us have many times been outside one another's expectations." Leetol raised a brow. "I do profusely apologize, but there were only three seats reserved…"

"Daddy," Taliopia said sternly, gripping Morinth's paw and squeezing. "if Morinth doesn't go: _I don't go._ We've talked about this before!"

Leetol was taken aback by the assertiveness, and for a moment, it looked like someone had walked up to him and slapped him across the snout. Morinth almost started cackling.

_Oh dear, did anyone else hear that terrible shatter of glass somewhere? Ha-haaa!_

"-I-I see." Leetol cleared his throat. "And I take it that this is your final deci-"

"_Daddy._"

"…*_sigh* _Yes, my daughter, yes. Fine."

"_Eeeee~!_" Taliopia squealed, almost choking Morinth as she squeezed her in a crushing hug. "This is gonna' be great tonight!"

"Some might say I'm like a bad smell when it comes to you guys, Leetol." The hybrid snickered. "I just can't help it! What would I do without Taliopia and her _lovely_ family by my side anyhow?"

"Dinner is at eight_._" Leetol swallowed a response he knew would land him in hotter water than he could chance in his already distant relationship with his own child. "Your mother is very excited to see you, so please do not be late."

"I won't, daddy!" Taliopia hopped a little away from Morinth and beamed at him, hugging her stuffed fox. "So, how are you today? Did you do anything coo-"

"I'm sorry, Taliopia, I have matters to attend to. Do conclude… whatever sort of business you have here. Did you not graduate from this place years ago?" Leetol took a series of glances around the campus and wing-shrugged. "Ah, the past. Anyway, I will see you soon. Ta-ta."

Taliopia lowered her eyes, frowning as she picked something out of her plushie's fur, and Leetol spread his massive, beautiful rosy wings before taking off.

"_Bloody asshole…_" Morinth grumbled, kneading Tali's shoulderblades.

"Did you say something, Morri-poo?"

"Not at all, my love." Morinth doted on her, nibbling the base of a horn. "Actually, I'm curious: when was the last time you saw your mother?"

"Oh! The last time I saw mommy was-" Taliopia paused. "…u-uhm…. _uh…_"

"Oh, Tali'." Morinth sighed, resting her snout between the medic's horns and brushing her face with a cool exhale under her chin.

"D-Does that make me _bad_, Morinth? That I don't see my mother?"

"_Bad?! _Are you fucking kidd-" Morinth shut herself up when the startled look on Tali's face became evident. She leaned back and locked tails with her, thinking for a second before changing her response. "-_No,_ not it doesn't make you bad or good or anything at all. It isn't by your choice that your relationship is a little… _estranged._"

"What does that word mean?" The medic blinked.

"It's the word dragons use when someone's being a doody-brained, pig-headed meanie. _So,_ about this temple…"

"Yeah! How are we supposed to get in?" Taliopia craned her neck around and blinked at the Guardian Temple.

"Back when I was still a student here, me and some of the other hens found a way that I guarantee the Guardians never discovered!" Morinth exclaimed. "This way!"

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo Wars OST: Flollo}**_

* * *

_"Mm. That's the tree, isn't it? I can still see the divet. It must have grown fat from all the blood, Mistress."_

_"Tch', you know there wasn't much then or after." Cynder ran a talon down the bark and brought her fingers back, rubbing the prints together as if some sort of residue had been acquired. "I think it was the first time in a long time that I had a competent fight ahead of me. That's a hard thing to find."_

_"…Mistress, if I may ask a question freely?"_

_"Lords and ladies, Reslo, you needn't suffer formalities in privacy such as this. I didn't ask you here to be prim and authoritative like my rank determines I should be."_

_"…Of course, Mistress."_

_"God, just call me _Cynder. _I won't ask again."_

_Evidently, that was too far a border for the emaciated dragoness' comfort zone to ever reach, because from that point on, Reslo didn't use anything to address Cynder's being, and instead constantly spoke aloof. _

_"Something was different before the fight and after. May I ask you what happened to cause that?" Reslo hopped onto a dragon-sized root splaying from the tree's massive foot, peering at Cynder with a pair of crisp, pretty, violet eyes. _

_"I don't think I know what you're talking about." Cynder snorted, gaze dancing over a portion of grass that was growing on the tree's merger with the dirt, just below the rented scar in its ancient wood where her tailblade had kissed long ago. "It is curious, though, the circumstances that brought us to that point and now to here. Consider this: we've been here before, several times, as conquerors and summarily defeated refugees."_

_"The Northerners are disgraceful but powerful too." Reslo reasoned with a half-smirk. "There isn't much guilt to be had when someone has put forth so much effort over those around them."_

_"Careful, you're starting to sound patronizing, Res'." Cynder chuckled and turned around, walking back towards an aisle between all the Avalarian trees. "Wouldn't it be ironic if they came back right this second?"_

_"Who? The Cheetahs?"_

_"Yes."_

_"That's unlikely." Reslo hopped off the root and trailed by the larger dragoness' side. Her thin limbs arced quietly with each step she took, exposing the bulge of her upper pelvis through the taught scales and flesh making her hips. Though it looked like some form of health problem, it was actually Reslo's natural body form. Her breed of Night Dragons were supposed to look like pencil-thin night-crawlers laden with thorns and bird-like snouts. "Most of the tribes migrated deeper into the forests, I've been hearing, some even hiding in the valleys where the Grublins can't seek them out. The Dark Master's touch is so constant, and yet so… weak._"

_"Fear not in saying it, at least." Cynder grinned. "I've advocated that exact view beyond count."_

_"And no one listens?"_

_"Why the fuck would they? And no, don't start bowing and begging for me to release you from this view of my own vulnerability. Take pride in it, however. You're the sole occupant of such a seat at the time."_

_Reslo looked meek as a slight flush overtook her face. They entered a foliage-hugged aisle winding in several directions through the forest. Nearby, the rush of the Twilight Falls and the mutter of the subsidiaries was constant over birds' songs and crickets._

_"You put too much trust in me." Reslo admitted._

_"Trust? Oh no, do not mistake my kindness as _trust,_ little one. That pride I said you should feel goes claw-in-claw with understanding. The understanding of knowing your place, which is and always will be beneath me."_

_Reslo ground her fangs as the two walked. _

_"Did you ask for me to be your escort just to remind me of that?" She grumbled._

_"No, I asked you to be my escort _because_ you are beneath me and the subject of some degree of kindness." Cynder smiled. "You've been looking tired lately. What ailes you?"_

_"…It's…" Reslo muttered, glancing down at her own body. "…it's nothing, Mistress."_

"-You were pregnant."

Cynder exhaled through her nose and opened her eyes, bringing back the real, living world as her recollections ended.

She was standing atop the edge of one of Oversight's many coastal cliffs, granting her a view of the bloodied and soiled beach to the northeast, speckled with ruined Dark Army engines and landing ships. The gray ocean held a few trailing Mole vessels and Ape man-o-wars, but aside from that, the majority of the battle had melded into the city center.

"Where the hell is he?" The black dragon grumbled, gazing around at the cloudy, late-afternoon sky. "I knew I should've simply showed up myself."

_No, no you know you shouldn't have. Do we really want another replay of Zargos the Pathfinder._

Cynder growled and dragged her claw through the grass.

Actually, she didn't know where Zargos had gone after his failed assassination attempt and betrayal of her goal. Cynder had been a fool to attempt to manipulate one of Malefora's assassins so brazenly. Relying on fanatical worship was something she could do with her Apes, not the Orcs of the Dark Continent. Hoping to attain otherwise was just dumb.

She didn't know why that reminded her of Reslo, her long-deceased minion straight from Darklight. She supposed her entire life was being called into question since the Fallen and Spyra had rearranged it so. Now was more of an opportunity she _hoped_ would work.

Reslo had been a far fetched dream, anyway. _That_ was another stupid decision on Cynder's end. Trying to talk double about seeking solace in a henchman. Reslo had done that well, for the few times in their brief careers together that Cynder had been able to find her. Then, that shit had gone down in the mountains. That horrible, ugly, bloody shit that didn't even leave a body for remembrance.

_Damned Dracolich. It killed Darkshade too, that oaf. _

"Aye, Mistress!"

Wings flapped and the ground thudded. A large Dreadwing covered in tribal fetishes with a ring of parrot-feathers hanging from its neck-tuft thundered into the grass and growled at her, an Ape wielding a bone-axe hopping down from the throne on its back.

"Jute." Cynder greeted, meeting the Chieftain halfway. "The flight wasn't too perilous, yes?"

"Nah, them draggos don't gots a clue about anythin past the Frontier shallows." Jute chortled. "Tall Plains is ours now. Me men are fortifying it as we speak, using some new traps that I fink you'd get a right kick out of if ya saw em!"

"Possibly. I have a task for you. It involves harming the Purple Dragon."

"Than it's a task I'll do no matta what, Mistress." Jute ground his fangs. "That little bitch smashed up me Dreadwing flight and killed Visigoth, her and that hoo-man. Am I killin him too with this?"

"He is untouchable, do you hear me? He is _mine._" Cynder snarled, surprising the Chieftain and making him take a step back.

"Aye, Mistress, I didn't mean ta-"

"The Purple Dragon and her companions are going to be passing through the mountains overlooking Solemn Pass, pursuing one of the Guardians that I have trapped in an ancestral location of her own people." Cynder explained. "Troops from Vandal's tribe have already donned winter gear and are traveling up into the peaks as we speak. I want you to take a small flight of Dreadwings and act as aerial support."

"How small a flight?" He asked suspiciously.

"Fifteen riders max."

"…Aight, I can manage a numba like that, given the losses. As long as Vandal's boys are up-front gettin shot full-a holes." Jute stepped closer to his Dreadwing, Charlee, and patted it between its misshapen, goblinoid eyes. Strangely, the hideous beast stopped growled and purred silently. "I'll lead em meself."

"Excellent. Kill the Purple Dragon and anyone else beside her. The human is to be kept alive."

"_Alive?!_"

"Do not test me, Chieftain." Cynder whipped her tailblade. "I have already suffered enough deviance from my plans and I will _not_ tolerate such from you or your fellows. Death awaits any who challenge that. Do you understand?"

"…But, why?" Jute held his claws out. "Wha could ya possibly need from da hoo-man? I'll do it! But I jus wanna know why!"

"None. Of. Your. _Concern._" She sneered. "Prepare your flights as soon as possible and bring them here. I plan on letting the knowledge slip of Guardian Cyrila's whereabouts when the time is right. The Purple Dragon will take the bait."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim OST: Combat #5}**_

* * *

Two hours.

It took two hours for Spyra to become exhausted.

The Fallen was not only impressed, but he was also in awe at her resilence. He actually had expected an hour and a _half._

Neither of them knew how many of the pikemen were left. Probably not a lot. But then again, being in a sea of enemies left little room for outside observations. For all they knew, the castle had already been taken, and they were hopelessly outmatched…

_No, hold on to hope._

Those weren't his words, but he stuck with them, even if he couldn't remember who had said it to him in the past.

All that mattered was keeping the steel from touching him. All that mattered was keeping Spyra's body away from any blows she couldn't see. He had a feeling she was doing the same for him.

They didn't know how many they killed. It was hundreds, but ultimately unknown. Things were too fast and terrifying to focus on anything else but staying alive. The Fallen felt like his heart was going to give out. Spyra felt like she had already dropped dead and somehow was still moving.

Flames erupted down a cluster of Grublins and sent scorched cadavers flipping across the plaza. A second later, and a purple missile landed among the disorganized defenders, spinning like a buzzsaw and shattering bones with each crash of her paws, tail and wings. Spyra mowed down a cluster of Grublins with her talons and tackled an Orc, splitting open his face with her claws and knuckles and transforming into an orb of flashing lightning when the Orc's fellows surrounded her swinging greatswords, and summarily died as steaming, blackened hunks of meat.

The Fallen slashed, parried, ducked, rolled and kicked, leaving a trail of mortally maimed and dead in his wake. He decapitated, removed legs and arms, impaled guts and saw open cuirasses to burst apart the ribcages beneath. At some points, he began to kill with his bare hands, pure adrenaline-fueled rage flowing in place of blood as he channeled every ounce of hatred he knew how to experience in a desperate bid to keep himself from suffering the strain of physical effort.

"_Behind you!_" He screamed, forcing himself through a ring of Grublins, suffering a slash on his leg and another on his hip as he disengaged. He ran to Spyra's position in the mob and ripped a polearm from a dead Grublin's claws. He reared back and chucked it, the blade running to the hilt as it impaled an Orc through the neck and sent it tumbling. The bastard had been running up behind her with a warhammer over its head.

"_No!_" Spyra shouted, twisting and tearing an Orc's head off from its shoulders, even taking the black-dribbling spine as she used her wings to fan a funnel of air and trap several Grublins under the corpse. "Behind_ you!_"

The childish shriek let him know before the thundering earth did. The Fallen killed a pair of Grublins and rolled over their falling bodies. A pair of rocky fists cratered the street in his wake, and the Troll screeched as it turned around to track his movements and attempt a second strike.

"Big ugly fucker…" He heaved, standing up.

An Orc rushed over and swung an axe at his face. The Fallen threw himself back and felt the blade glance the top of his helmet and slide up the curve, which effectively saved his life.

He met the street with a clatter and rolled when a Grublin came down with a hatchet. The human parried blows as he stood, grabbing and crushing the center of the Grublin's face with his fingers. He merged the Orc's axe with his armplate shield and ran his gladius through his guts, twisting and using the edges of the pommel to rip back, a moist tumble of intestines spilling between both their booths.

He climbed the Orc's wobbling body and threw himself off its shoulders. The Troll swung again and flattened the Orc like a black, runny pancake in a near miss. It screamed in frustration and continued pursuing him through the melee.

"_Hey! Ugly!_" Spyra appeared in flight and zapped the flank of its head with a lightning bolt. "_Your mother takes it up the ass from gay drakes who think she's a guy!_"

The Fallen used the distraction and climbed up the Troll's arm. It shrieked and attempted to bat him off, but he reached its neck too soon, and ran his gladius through its left eye. The Troll screamed and thrashed about. He ripped out the remains of the first and then speared the other eye, pushing the gladius into the gore-spewing socket until he was elbow deep.

The Troll teetered and crushed a legion of its own allies when it fell. The Fallen rode the wave of motion and used it to hurl himself into a cluster of Orcs, knocking most of them prone as he recovered and started stabbing one of them to death as it attempted to stand.

Spyra landed nearby and transformed herself into a living comet, dashing through and incinerating entire squads before the fireball burst and showered a pair of OgreOrcs in draconic napalm. She flew into and gripped over the face of one of the large monsters, breathing a stream of electricity into its open mouth until its belly and chest popped open like soot-spitting cysts.

Mole pikemen were indeed surviving on the edges of the melee, Spyra and the Fallen absorbing enough of the initial charge that the squads were still functioning under extreme duress. They were surrounded by a mountain of dead that had been sliced to pieces trying to climb through the wall of polearms. Mole rifle fire was killing scores, and the brass cannons saw to it that phantom explosions bloomed among the deeper crowds and slew tens.

* * *

_**{Dragon Age: Inquisition OST: Pride Demon Battle}**_

* * *

"_Purple Dragon!_" Bellowed a thundering voice from the center of the mobs.

Spyra flipped away from a dying Orc and landed in a clearing of the melee, panting as she followed the call and settled her gaze on an Orc stomping through the ranks towards her.

He was massive, a black banner flowing from the pole setup on his back, his armor colored crimson like scabbing blood. He was easily eight feet tall, and his boots clattered loudly even over all the shouts and howls and gunshots.

"_Come closer, wyrm-bitch!" _Lord Urukal hollered. "_So that I may cleave your horned head from your shoulders!_"

Spyra would've normally had some kind of smart-assed retort.

However, she was wheezing so badly that she couldn't speak. So she opted for the express way of dealing with this.

She spread her wings and lunged right at him, Urukal meeting her halfway with a quick sprint and howling roar.

Spyra leapt and flipped over his serrated axe, landed by his flank, and immersed his leg and hips in a torrent of flame.

Urukal twisted around like the fire was mere rain pattering off his armored bulk and backhanded her across the face. Something snapped, and Spyra suddenly couldn't feel her mouth.

Urukal grinned and brought the axe down in a vertical chop. She rolled, forcing herself through blooming pain in every part of her body as she dodged a summary series of slashes the warlord mounted in her direction.

"I didn't believe the tales of your invincibility." Urukal's gruff, monstrous voice etched over the clang of metal and shrieks of death. "I still do not."

Spyra landed on the haft of his axe in the next swing and spat a bolt of lightning into his face. The Orc reeled and grabbed at his helmet. She scrambled up to his shoulders and head-butted him horns first. His helmet shrieked and metal ripped. Urukal stumbled back and crushed to death several unwary Grublins in his bid to right himself.

No sooner had he shook his bloodied head and readied his stance, the purple dragoness shot back at him like a magnetized bullet and twisted mid-leap. Her golden tail-leaf caught his temple and sent the Orc's head swinging roughly to the side with an aberrant crunch.

The warlord endured a fireball bursting to ashes across his chest. The blast killed every other Dark soldier by his sides, but left him still standing. Urukal snarled, reached up and ripped his tortured helmet off his face, exposing the hideous, gnarled reality of his crocodilian features and buggy, little red eyes.

The Orc bellowed at her and thundered the earth as he stampeded through the dead and dying. He swung his axe and clawed in the same movement. Spyra dodged the prior and was caught by the latter in the chest. She flipped across the street and skidded to a halt. Urukal had already reached her before she could recover and brought his axe down.

_Then_, a Grublin's polearm impaled his shoulder and shot his aim off. The warlord plowed his blade into the cobble by Spyra's flank, and cast an enraged sneer at his newest attacker.

The Fallen strode through a wall of Orcs and Grublins, dancing between them and slashing open stomachs and throats with trained flicks of the arm. An OgreOrc stepped between him and his target, brandishing a maul.

The Fallen slid between its legs and opened it with an incision down its groin. He climbed up the stumbling beast's back and yanked to the street with a horrible crash before taking his gladius in an underhanded grip, stabbing it in the face until it died.

Urukal snorted and tore his axe free from the street, stumbling away when Spyra breathed fire across his body and relocated in a swift scramble of paws.

"_Human._" The Orc growled.

The Fallen sprinted over and stabbed him in the leg, running the gladius to the hilt in the Orc's muscular thigh.

Urukal snarled and corkscrewed with his axe whilst stepping back. The blade caught the Fallen in the stomach and cut upwards through his chest, sparks and metal flying everywhere as he tossed onto his back and sprawled in the street, the armor saving him, but becoming shredded in the process.

"Your Moles are tin-workers." Urukal grumbled, making to stomp on his head, but missing when the Fallen rolled. "_Stand still and die._"

Spyra came out from the flank again and zapped him with lightning. This time, the blow lifted the warlord off his heels. He fell back into a swamp of Orcs and Grublins and vanished from their sight, leaving only a quickly dissipating trail of soot.

* * *

_**{Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim OST: Combat #4}**_

* * *

"_They're getting through the gate!" _A Mole pikeman hollered.

As the Fallen ran over and steadied Spyra, they both turned to see that a Troll had stampeded through the polearmsmen and was beating its rocky fists into the gates, jittering them with each impact and splintering the wood.

"Get its legs!" He yelled.

They killed their way through a Grublin net and shouldered through a line of pikemen engaged with some Orcs. Spyra set the Troll's legs ablaze and the Fallen climbed up its spine-moss.

As they killed the first offender, the Troll thundered back from the gates and collapsed in a heap, several Moles ran over and started dipping their pikes into the softer portions of its body while the Fallen sliced its face to ribbons and Spyra roasted any Orcs or Grublins that attempted to intervene.

Two more Trolls completely ignored the pikemen line and threw themselves at the gates. The wood splintered and the brass etchings became shredded.

"_Fallen!_" Spyra cried, stepping back when a torrent of flames failed to get the Trolls to even glance at the burn wounds on their legs. "I can't stop them!"

An Orc broke through the line, killed a Mole in its path and tackled Spyra. The Fallen screamed out for her, trying to slash his way through a cluster of Grublins when one of them knocked his sword free.

A new kind of beast they had not encountered before thundered through the fray, a larger Grublin armored in fungus-like plates with a pachyderm-styled growth protecting its skull-like face like a helmet. The creature drew a sharpened moss-gauntlet over the Fallen's head. He tumbled.

"Break down the gates!" Urukal sliced with his axe, cutting an opening through the breaking pikemen that sent a cluster of bodies flying off in two halves. He pinned a Mole under his heel and crushed it with a morose splatter. "Kill everything inside the castle!"

It was _then_ that the dragons descended entirely.

Drakes had been harrying the horde the whole while, but the draconic officers had chosen to hold off on a concentrated attack, and the strategy paid off.

An Electric drake knocked Urukal off his feet with a lightning bolt, and a Wing of Ices froze the entirety of the front ranks of the force in beams of shining white light, transforming squads into disorganized fields of icicles stuck in various positions of fright and anger.

Pillars of flame cut through the mobs like hot knives as Fires swept overhead, occasionally landing and dicing their way through weaker mobs with claws and tailblades. One of the Trolls died as stalagmites made of glowing green rock materialized from a flight of Earths penetrated its head and chest in tens.

"_Spyra!_" The Fallen snapped a Grublin's neck, tackling another. He punched it in the head until the center of its skull caved in and his gauntlet's knuckles were glistening black. He stole its polearm and tackled the Grublin champion from before, decapitating it and throwing the body into another gaggle of its kin attempting to intercept him.

A Fire Dragon zipped over his head, its flame breath incinerating a whole row of Orcs in his path. He jumped through the scorch and embers and ran for where he had seen the purple heroin earlier.

The second Troll's head burst in a wet, fiery mess. Spyra appeared from under its barreled chest as the corpse flattened against the gate and left a black smear as it slid down heavily. She landed in front of him, blood dribbling out of her mouth.

"Spyra…" He breathed, falling to his knees and gripping her shoulders. She made a wet noise and put her forehead against his.

"Reinforcements! From the rear!" The Mole captain from before hollered, sliding a dead Orc off the end of his pike. "It's Guardian Terradora!"

An explosion echoed like thunder across the battlefield. Spyra and the Fallen looked over and saw a mushroom-cloud of tan smoke rising from the back of the Dark Army's ranks. A flight of dragons approached from the south and spread out over the rear ranks of the mob, elemental breaths cleaving through the mounds of beast-soldiers. A battalion of Moles completely surprised the back of Urukal's line and summarily began to slaughter the units of Orcs and Grublins who had literally been facing the wrong direction.

At the head of this spear was a huge, muscular, green dragoness who landed in the middle of the monstrous horde like a meteor, her very body causing the impact that saw the cloud's existence. Bodies were flying everywhere as the wicked macehead tipping her tail arced to and fro, shattering skeletons and pulping flesh.

An OgreOrc charged from the flank and swung at Terradora with a maul. The Guardian slipped back and pinned the beast to the street when a trio of stalagmites the size of men each flew out of her maw and bloodily ran through the Orc's chest and head.

Shoving his way to the flank, Lord Urukal and a band of Orcs began to distance themselves from the center.

"Stay close." The warlord sneered, tasting his own blood as it ran down his snout in rivulets. "We're retreating."

"What of the rest of the army?" One of his lieutenants croaked, another Orc nursing a wound on his chest.

"They'll keep the enemy's eyes off us. Move."

Back towards the gates, the Fallen and Spyra observed the battle for another moment.

"You still got some?" He grunted, reaching down and picking up a Grublin's sword from the bloodied ground.

Spyra winced when she tried to open her mouth and nodded.

"Then let's go."

The two of them surged forwards and began to kill their way into the front ranks of the army yet again. The rifle fire redoubled, the cannons went silent as it became too risky to fire into the melee on account of hitting their own. The shriek of metal and the cries of dying Orcs began to lower in volume more and more.

Another hour.

Another hour of killing and maiming.

Then, the Fallen hacked the head off an Archer and shouldered the stumbling corpse from his path.

When he raised the greatsword he'd taken over his head to strike, he faltered.

Standing before him was a Mole, covered in grime and blood and wielding a sword and shield.

The Fallen staggered and fell to a knee, breathing uncontrollably as he saw a whole line of Mole soldiers, mixed with dragons towering over their heads. He looked up, seeing the Northerners circling over the courtyard like vultures.

He looked everywhere.

Left, right, behind, forwards.

There were no Grublins or Orcs or Trolls or anything that he could see, none that weren't lying as mounds of corpses. There were just stringent groups of Moles, stumbling around, sticking any Dark soldiers still twitching. Dragons were landing and surveying for survivors themselves.

There was nothing but a crisp wind, the crackle of fire and the din of the evening.

That was it.

They had won.

The Fallen dropped his weapon and fell onto the seat of his breaches between some bodies. He ripped his helmet off and craned his soaked head at the darkening sky, trying so hard to get his breathing under control, and only succeeding after long minutes of wheezing and gasping.

His mouth felt like sandpaper. His body ached so badly that the pain was threatening to make him cry. He couldn't smell anything. Every single centimeter of his body was coated in blood, sweat and dirt. He was bleeding from multiple wounds, and had to spit when reams of gore ran over his lips.

Heavy footsteps caught his attention.

He lazily leaned his chin down and watched as Terradora, the Guardian of Earth, trotted over to him through the ranks of Northern soldiers. She was just as covered in gore and filth as he was, and she hadn't even been in that fight as long.

The two regarded one another for a moment.

He grinned cheaply.

Terradora sneered and spat on the street.

"…The Pool didn't do you justice." He wheezed. "You're actually pretty _hot._"

The Guardian smiled sourly and bowed her head, huffing at her own talons.

"When I recover," She grunted. "I am going to kill you."

Spyra appeared and collapsed by his side, leaning into his flank. The mighty purple dragoness only found enough vigor in herself to bury her head in his gut, her breathing erratic, and rasping.

"…Get in line, lady." The Fallen weakly sniggered. "You're not the first to tell me that this week."

"Don't tell me we have to fight her too." Spyra gurgled over her ruined jaw.

* * *

{🐉}


	34. Chapter 33 - Dreary Days

**Dragon(s)layer**

**33**

* * *

**Dreary Days**

* * *

"How does _this_ one look?"

"…_Mmmmm… _Too green."

Taliopia gave a melodramatic groan and hurried back inside the room. Drawers were heard closing, and the wardrobe rattled as its shelves were parted violently.

"Tali', you're making a fuss out of something that is not _im-por-taannnntttt~…._" Morinth sang, securing a strap and grunting when she tightened the cut. "I really think they'll be well and cheeky fine with whatever you show up with on that lovely body of yours. If you spent half as much time picking out clothes as you did tidying your side of the nest, _maybe_ we wouldn't take so long in the morning to get to garrison duty."

"Not _clothes_, Morri-poo! Clothes are so… so… _common. _These are _dresses._" Taliopia bounded like a gazelle back into the doorframe of the suite's lobby and held up a new specimen, the hangar clenched in her teeth delicately. "_How abou dissch won?_"

It was a vibrant sapphire sequen, with frilled, layered caps armored down the hindquarters and a cute, bushy bow meant to link the ribbons that tied off the belly paunch and a golden-detailed drapery for the breast.

Morinth didn't answer immediately when she looked up, but prior memories flashed in her head from the last time her bubbly mate had worn that particular outfit.

She remembered that Taliopia had kind of looked like a big blueberry peacock on steroids.

A cute blueberry peacock on steroids, but nevertheless…

"_Hmmmm…_" When she scrunched her snout, Taliopia duplicated her exercised groan from before and sprinted back inside the nesting room. "-Hey, wait! That didn't mean I was saying no!"

"You didn't have to, your face did it for you!" Taliopia called back, whining in panic as hangars clattered on the floor and linen swished. "_Uggghh~! Morri-poo, I don't know what to wear~!_"

"Technically, my love, you needn't wear anything, seeing as it's societally acceptable in this city to walk around naked." Morinth mumbled under her breath, looking up at the little dressing mirror propped in the corner of the foyer. She stopped adjusting the straps and posed proudly with an assured smile on her snout.

Where Taliopia had been slowly devolving into manic madness over the situation, she'd chosen to go simple. Just a pair of shined military pauldrons, the ones she'd received as standard issue when her and Tali' had first graduated the academy. It was just enough to let folks know of her career choice, and was passable at just the right amount for it to be the lowest form of elite acceptability.

What with the trying times of the war, nobody was giving lip to the soldiers in Warfang.

Though, seeing as to who the identities of their hosts were, perhaps this assuredness was less factual.

Morinth wing-shrugged and turned herself about to get a good angle at every part of her midnight body. If it really came down to it, she could always just feign indigestion from a bad blast of flame-breath and call it a night.

Though it did feel silly to be so fanatical (not as fanatical as Taliopia, but still fanatical) –about her appearance, given this evening's plans. She chalked it up to simple feminine eagerness. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone on a fancy outing with anyone, much less her nurse. She did want to look good, even if the intent was not to impress anyone but herself.

She gave a pleased little rumble at the fine, slightly sapphire sheen the scalewash on her hide was giving her coat in the concentrated light of the chandelier above her head. Her back was gracefully curved, her wings strong and wide, and her abdomen was still as curvaceous and swept as ever, despite the… _incident_ back south.

For a moment, Morinth righted herself back around, frowning as she sat back and ran a paw gingerly down her plated stomach.

She could still remember the pain and sensations, obviously, seeing as it was rather a young disaster.

It was hard to believe that she had actually been gutted by the Dark Master herself. Never before had the war felt so real, and that was saying something, because she was a several year veteran by this point.

Morinth's military record wasn't as illustrious as, say, that of Harad's or Ignitia's and the other Guardians (Terradora especially) –but it wasn't devoid of accomplishments either. She'd been too late by almost a year to fight in the last continental invasion, but she had served in the series of northern skirmishes that blasted around the highlands just before the range past Warfang's walls. She'd been deployed to Avalar for '_Infestation Control' _–once before, and had also received a citation for saving two of her fellows during an ambush.

The armor was as much a grim reminder of the dangers she lived among as it was one of the great pride she had rightfully held claim to.

So it was with a bit of regality that she could crane back her spine and pump out her shapely chest. She even gave herself an austere and prim expression some snobby noble would have, in the mirror. Morinth giggled and played with one of the security tassles snug to her chest.

Her thoughts ran a bit amok as Taliopia's mewls of uncertainty sounded out in tune with drawers clattering and floorboards creaking as she sprinted around like a terrified mouse.

She did this to look nice for herself, and for Tali' too, yes…

But for some reason, her mind was trailing over to a different sort of question:

_I wonder if the Fallen would like it._

Morinth sniffed and twirled around again in another quadruped trot.

She wasn't a homely 'ness by far. She was athletic, sculpted, with a pretty, long face and striking wingspan, a curved breast, ample hips (not as ample as Taliopia's, but still better than average) -and polished scales.

She was a catch, at least physically.

But she'd never given much care to it in the past. What really had that human done to her and her mate? Something about his touch…

"What about _this_ one? Maybe? Maybe?" Taliopia danced in the doorframe, the newest outfit jostling over her cream-colored, rosy body.

"It looks mighty ravishing, my dear, so let's hit the road." Morinth swallowed quickly and hurried away from the mirror.

"B-But Morri'-poo, you didn't even look!"

"I looked with my _heart,_ and have cheekily come back with all positives and treats. The dress looks _fine,_ Tali'-wali, so quit being a slow-tail and let's go."

"…I-I'm not sure I have enough makeup on…" The medic fretted. "-I'm not used to going out anymore, all the army habits and… and stuff. I'm scared."

"Don't be scared, just concentrated. They'll hardly be concerned with your looks, and more about your company." Morinth locked the last of three clips on her horn and gave her crown a swish, humming as the golden, decorative bands layering from their undersides clinked like thin chimes. "So, I guess it's _me_ that should be concentrated, so I don't lose my _temmm-peerrrrr~…_"

"You don't really think they'll be… t-that _bad_, do you?" Taliopia's nails clicked as she trotted into the foyer, her rosy eyes wide with concern. "Morinth?"

"That's a sort of unfair question. Would you ask me to predict how the mind of _Infernia_ works?" Morinth scoffed as she closed the cabinet and joined the nurse.

"No! She's crazy. At least, that's what the stories say…"

"Anybody who wastes away inside some ugly, hot-as-hell volcano for that long must have a few gems missing from the hoard. I don't mean to sound nasty, but they're much the same way. …Err, minus the genocidal intent."

"Oh, but mother is so sweet! Especially ever since father started making her take her medication in the morning. He crushes it and puts it in her brew." Taliopia giggled before beaming with some sort of pride. "She only had mental breakdowns the first few days, and then she was all better!"

Poor Morinth felt her face twitch as she grabbed the medic and tugged her out of the suite and into the hallways of the commonhouse.

"Your parents are an _eccentric_ sort." Morinth admitted as she stood on her hinds to lock the door. "No more or cheeky less than you or me. _Now,_ did you write the address down?"

"Mmhm! I have it right here-" Taliopia patted around the waistband of her dress. "…oh, poo."

Morinth sighed and started _un_locking the door.

* * *

{🐉}

Just crossing the street felt like a death march. It wasn't because the building or the neighborhood looked bad or anything, quite the contrast with the prior: the place looked expensive enough to bankrupt a general.

But that was exactly the point.

Only dragons who had enough coin to buy peoples' souls were the type of crowd here. The place stank of borderline authoritarian elitism like no one's business. All it needed was the forlorn echo of distant and snide laughter roving from the interior to the sidewalk for the image to be complete.

Ironically, right as the sour visage crept into her horned head, the very exact thing happened, and a bawl of snobby cackles paraded their way through one of the painted windows.

"_EE-eeewwwww…~_" –The dragon sang under her breath.

"Did you say something, Morri-poo? I-It's the dress, isn't it? Y-You don't like it don't you? If you don't like it, mother won't like it! A-A-And neither will father! Oh my god, _oh my god, I'm hyperventilating._"

With a patient sigh, Morinth reached over and stroked a claw down Taliopia's rosy neck, making sure to drag the tips of her talons along the rims of the scute-fins. The panicky nurse shivered with a little whine, and for a moment made herself look like she'd bounced inside her own attire, her dress's blouse pluming like a puff of red smoke, and the trailers on her crown leaped like leaves on the wind.

"M-Morri'?"

"My doctoring 'ness needs to _chill_." Morinth said in a rare moment of bluntness. "I told you back at home that you looked ravishing, and cheeky that, nothing's changed for the last few blocks. Shocking, isn't it?"

"…I-I guess you're right…" Taliopia swallowed, craning her head around to watch herself angle her thick hip, prostrating the crimson velvet of the blouse secured around ber lower half. She gave her rump a wiggle and frowned when the frills jostled. "…Actually… N-No, nonono, I look stupid, it's too flashy."

"All the lusting stares you've been getting from the males walking by are proof of the contrary." Morinth hummed, brushing their wings together as she turned a full, slow circuit around the meeker dragoness. Her green eyes glowed in the evening dark as she examined her mate's body hungrily. "And they aren't the only ones appetized by your riveting appearance…"

"R-Really?" Taliopia shyly bundled on her own haunches, clutching the vibrant, crimson dress closer to herself as she tried to hide in it. "Well, I don't know… I think I might've made a mistake."

_Oh you did, my love, just not with your wardrobe,_ Morinth silently thought. _I wish she would just take the estrangement. _

"You're letting your nerves get to you. I think- and, call me naïve –that they'll be simply thrilled to see your cute, rosy little face."

Morinth swallowed as she played with the loops hanging from her horns.

In all actuality, her nerves were being just as bad, and everything she said was half-assed in authenticity. _Yes: _Taliopia's parents _were_ that bad.

_No:_ she'd never tell her that.

"They're here." Taliopia gasped, and Morinth gagged as a pair of white claws snatched up the bands of her pauldrons and dragged her closer to Tali's panicked face. "_They're here!_"

"-_C-Can't- b-breathe-_"

"Taliopia, there you are." A pair of white, rose-winged dragons touched down on the cobblestone before them, folding their spans up as they trotted closer. Councilor Leetol studiously gazed at his daughter past the bridge of his snout. "Right on schedule at least. Very good."

"_Father!_" Taliopia released her mate, who gasped in exasperation and clung onto her to avoid toppling over from the sudden onrush of oxygen. "H-Hello, father."

"_Tali',_ so good to see you." A white dragoness beside Leetol stepped forwards, her sleeker muzzle painted with a dangerous and sharp smile. This was Meraleethe, Taliopia's mother.

"Hello, mother." Tali' squeaked, shifting uncomfortably underneath her dress. "W-What a lovely outfit you have this evening!"

"Mm, yes," Meraleethe gazed down at the austere silver and black corset wrapping up the mid-point of her narrow breast. "it is indeed, quite."

Taliopia smiled hopefully as Morinth recovered behind her. She wiggled the flare of her own dress and stepped a little closer.

"V-Very nice indeed, mother."

"You already said so, dear, and once more: I _know._" Meraleethe harrumphed, not even looking at Taliopia anymore as she sidled up to her mate. Her gaze fell to the left, and immediately, a befouled sneer crawled down her chops. "_Oh,_" She huffed. "and I see you brought your… your… _friend_, with you. How lovely."

"Yes, _lovely,_ certainly." Leetol sighed, appearing more dismissive but no less hostile.

"Evening pa, mum." Morinth flexed her brows. She always addressed them like actual in-laws, only because she knew it drove Leetol crazy, and Meraleethe crazier. "It's a lovely establishment you found here."

"M-Morinth's my _mate_, mommy, daddy!" Taliopia hopped back and wrapped her forepaws over Morinth's neck, choking her off again. "Didn't you tell mother she was coming too, father?"

"Indeed," Meraleethe growled, bearing down on the Councilor with a frightening glare. "_didn't you,_ my love? Inform me of such a development?"

"…Perhaps I experienced a moment of forgetfulness." Leetol pawed at the street. Meraleethe narrowed her eyes and started lashing with her tail.

"-_Cheeky- that-! _Yes, mhmm…" Morinth broke free of the strangulation, rubbing her throat as she settled and met the two dragons' eyes. "I couldn't pass up the opportunity for such a lovely evening out, especially if it means I get to spend it with my lovely Tali-wali and her… ehm… even _lovelier _family! You two look _rava-shiiinngggg~._" She sang.

Meraleethe slowly began to crumple the longer the note went on, like she was a giant, living ball of tin-foil being compressed in a phantom fist. Leetol had shut his eyes, and suddenly appeared as if he was experiencing the need to drive his face through a brick wall.

In a completely different direction, Taliopia giggled and nuzzled Morinth's nose.

"You're so talented, Morinth." The nurse pecked her scaly cheek.

"Ah. How could we forget your, ehm… '_talents',_ yes." Leetol cleared his throat, tapping his mate to inform her that the racket had ceased and she could stop cringing. "Surely you're both empty-stomached enough for a fine meal?"

"Or _two,_ eh? Ha!" Morinth and Taliopia's laughter flared, and then slowly died when they realized neither of their hosts had even blinked.

"-Aha! Aha-hahaha…ha…. _Mmmhmmph…_" Morinth rubbed the back of her neck. "-I guess it wasn't really funny anyway, ehm… d-does anyone else feel their blood pressure going up, by chance?"

"_MmMm,_ no Morri-poo, I'm good!" Taliopia obliviously smiled. "I'm a doctor, so I can tell."

"_That_ is a good topic of discussion tonight." Meraleethe snorted, dragging her mate along with her tail snagging his wrist. "It's been so long since we discussed your choices of career, Taliopia."

"_We should have sent her to the colleges out east._" Leetol mumbled at her. "_Reared her properly for government._"

"_Don't be simple, my love, she was meant for the mercantile wing. If you spent half as much time examining where the wealth in this city goes as you did debating the passing of silly, pointless bills, you would have seen that._"

"For once," Morinth whispered to Taliopia. "I think _I'm_ the one of us two who's terrified."

It didn't take long for them to be seated. The Moles staffing the joint knew Leetol was a Councilor and had gone out of their ways to make everything as _perfect_ as possible.

Unfortunately, while Leetol's definition of perfectionism was a little more on par with the standards of the majority of draconic society, Meraleethe's were a little more… _refined._

And very specific.

"I prefer white, actually." The smile she gave the waiter was so passive-aggressive, that Morinth could've sworn her eyes started to burn from how corrosive the air got. "And if you could, dear, bring me a cup with a thinner neck? It's much more nimble on the paw and maintains class."

"It's quite alright, my cherry blossom, the choice of glassware isn't reflective of-"

"Oh contrare', my darling husband, it is quite _not_ alright. I have an image to keep in perspective, and my etiquette hinges on that image." Meraleethe harrumphed, pouting on her side of the table. "Besides, whom else will uphold the dying times of proper station? If it weren't for the self-dedication of the few and true, we'd all have devolved into an assortment of cross-eyed primitives long ago."

"Yes dear." Leetol dejectedly swirled his wine. He was already two cups deep in his stigma.

Morinth couldn't blame him: she was just about to hit _three_, and the freaking appetizers hadn't even come out yet. It felt strange having a small amount of agreement with Leetol, despite it being unspoken. Usually, the two of them couldn't stand one another.

_But…_ Morinth would've rather dealt with Leetol any day of the week if it meant she didn't have _Meraleethe_ stinking up the room…

"_Tah~! _And this tablecloth… it clashes with the atmosphere." Meraleethe scoffed. "Honestly, hasn't anyone preserved their sense of design?"

"It's just a tablecloth, dear." Leetol mumbled as he sipped his wine.

The restaurant was quite snazzy once you got past the aged, almost gothic exterior of the building from street-view. A modest and sizable chamber formed circularly around a decorative mural ring colored with blues and blacks to resemble marble-made flower arrangements under a stylized dragon's head. The politely tinged clink of glasses and silverware meshed comfortably with the hushed, ever-present undertone of tables whose occupants were locked in conversation.

Morinth felt like she stuck out like a sore paw-thumb in the joint. All the customers here looked like nobility, even the _Moles._ Richly embroidered dresses on females, polished pauldrons and tassles on males. She even spotted a monocle or two.

"I think it looks pretty in here, especially with the blue drapes." Taliopia bounced a little in her seat, minding her mother's earlier comments. She summarily shrunk almost under the table when Meraleethe's steely gaze ceased strangling Leetol and immediately latched over her like a passing blizzard. "…_o-or not. Yes mother, it… it clashes._"

_Oh-ho, fuck._

Morinth's eyes were a bit hazy as she gulped down the last of the glass and set it down daintily beside her empty plate. She hiccupped. When Taliopia looked at her, she gave a lopsided grin and reached over to rub a paw down the nurse's twitching wing joints.

Taliopia shifted anxiously in her chair.

"_Morri'…_" She whined. "-_s-stop that!_"

"_No._" Morinth teased and stuck her tongue out.

_"Wait until we get home at least…_"

"But you're so cute when you squirm." Morinth chuckled, squeezing a little- '_Eep~!' _–out of Tali' when she dug with her talons a bit. The poor medic blushed pure red and tried to ignore the pleasurable waves ebbing out through her muscles. "See? It's like playing a cute, red-frilly and white piano."

"_Oohhh, frilly… _I-I knew this one was a bad choice." Taliopia shivered, running a paw down one of the corset bands of her dress. "I should've just worn the blue one. Oh, but, wait, that would've clashed…"

"If we went with what you thought was a bad choice, we wouldn't have been able to leave the lair." Morinth reluctantly took her paw away when Tali's parents stopped bickering. "And it only clashes in _some _dragons' eyes. By the way, now that I'm thinking about it: you didn't have any such urgency when we were going to dinner with the _Fallen._ Cheeky odd, that."

"O-Oh no, I did!" Taliopia defended, seeming suddenly meek. "-H-He's just so… so _informal_, though. But in a good way. He's so much more relaxed."

"Who might that be, that you are speaking of, daughter?" Leetol asked over his cup. "A comrade in your unit perhaps?"

"K-Kinda'." Taliopia blurted before she could catch her own mouth. "He's a soldier."

"Ah. If that is true, then that is a fantastic development." Meraleethe hummed. "A _male_ would do you good, Taliopia."

Morinth coughed as she choked on her wine.

"_-*hack*-W-WELL,_" She sputtered. "-isn't _that_ blunt, Meraleethe?"

"Oh, no, _no._" Meraleethe smiled and waved a paw. "No insinuations intended. None. I'm just saying that if Taliopia expanded her social palette, it would aid her in her daily career. You know what they say about diversification and whatnot."

"It's too bad that the wyrms preaching that can't even take their eyes off the same color that's been in their face for decades." Morinth laughed, noticing Meraleethe's expression as it instantly darkened. "Hardly good conversation though, 'specially since it's otherdragons' problems."

"Tell us, Taliopia," Leetol shot the argument down before it could ramp up, gesturing to the nurse. "your quest in the south. I have heard strange tales of what your fellows have encountered."

"And what is this _Fallen_ creature that all of my workers keep talking about?" Meraleethe grunted, tearing her gaze off of Morinth. "Ever since Lady Ignitia's words have reached the populace, it's all anyone speaks of. Ironically, the news has spread like wildfire."

"Most things flung through the muzzle of a _Fire_ Dragon tend to do that." Leetol judgmentally smiled.

"My _mother_ was a Fire." Morinth said, deadpanned. She shrugged. "-_But_, keeping the subject: the swamps aren't exactly a place I'd fancy for retirement. I think Tali' could agree with that."

"O-Oh yes." The medic shook her head earnestly. "…Uh… it's really _smelly_ down there, and unpleasant."

"Of course of course." Meraleethe hummed. "As are most places outside our glorious walls." Her eyes flickered up at Morinth. "Or _beneath_ them."

Morinth filled her glass nearly to the brim with the bottle the waiters had left, sending some drops flying from the neck when she put the latter back down roughly in its place.

"Captain Harad and Ignitia led us to the Dragon Temple, to search for any clues or relics the other teams hadn't found. But we didn't find anything." Taliopia explained as she took a meager sip of her wine. "-Actually, something found _us._"

"The Fallen and the Purple Dragon of legend." Morinth hopped a bit in her chair. "His name's the Fallen, and her name is Spyra! Both cheeky wonderful folks they are."

"Yeah, Spyra's the best." Taliopia nodded. "…T-Though, recently, we and her had a bit of a, uhm… falling out. B-But it's not a big deal! We just had a little argument. We're best friends with the Purple Dragon, mommy! Aren't you proud?"

"Hmm? Of course, love, of course." Meraleethe flashed an insincere grin and went back to looking for the waiter who still hadn't come back with their food. "Where is that blasted Mole?"

"Patience, my cherry blossom." Leetol sighed. "So the Purple Dragon. I saw her when the Council convened on the issue days ago. She seemed… _fresh._"

"_Someone born in those marshes, would be_." Meraleethe said under her breath. "Alas, if the legends are to be believed, then she is a sign of great hope."

"Spyra's amazing, mother! She can fight, and she's brave, and-"

"-It would be more tasteful if our hope understood the value of _toiletries,_ but it is indeed hope." The matron wing-shrugged.

Morinth almost crushed her glass. Really, the only thing that kept her from lashing out was Taliopia's tenuous, shy voice as she elaborated on everything that had happened during their perilous fight against Cynder and her Apes.

Both Leetol and Meraleethe actually dedicated a decent amount of focus on their own daughter when she recanted the deeds of Spyra and the Fallen. Morinth didn't think either of them believed half of it, but the details of the story captured their respect.

"When we came back to the city, Morinth was rushed to the castle healers." Taliopia said quietly, playing with her glass. "…When she got hurt like that, I… I was so afraid. I don't know what I would've done with myself if something happened to you, Morinth."

Morinth ignored Leetol and Meraleethe's disapproving gazes and craned over to give the nurse a quick peck on the snout.

"I'm not going anywhere, my doctoring 'ness. _Ever._"

"…Hmm." Leetol stared down at his lap. "The Dark Master herself, manifesting to do battle. I had not been expecting a story such as that tonight."

"Well at least Taliopia wasn't there for it." Meraleethe said. "…I do feel for your pain, Morinth. I really do."

Morinth growled.

A moment later, and a small team of Mole waitstaff hurried over with their dishes, depositing them one at a time in each appropriate spot. The meat sizzled and the vegetables glistened, all fresh from the kitchens. Despite her foul mood, even Morinth felt herself salivating when the delectable scents touched her snout.

"Lovely." Leetol sighed, tying his napkin as a bib at the base of his long neck. "-Quite a riveting tale indeed. Perhaps there _is_ some hope in this war with two such warriors on our side. I would greatly like to meet this Fallen and the Purple Dragon face to face. The distant view in the Councilor Chambers was unsatisfactory for such a desire, I think."

"It is spectacular." Meraleethe agreed, taking a forks' nibble of some of the lettuce in her side-salad. "It would be more spectacular if our daughter was in her proper place, by my side in the merchants' waves." She ignored Leetol's annoyed glance and looked at Morinth again. "-_And,_ it would be double the spectacular if she had a proper mate to stand beside it with."

Silverware clattered as Morinth brought a fist down beside her plate, she was quivering as her emerald eyes narrowed. Taliopia shrunk so much in her seat, that it looked like she had lost height. Some nearby patrons glanced over at the noise.

"_Proper,_ Meraleethe? Oh my, what a hysterically ironic thing to hear from you." Morinth spat. "All because you can't accept me and your own daughter for who we are. Meanwhile, Leetol here looks like the life's been sapped out of him like he's a cheeky prune! Let me ask you, pa, do you even remember what it's like to live without a headache?"

Offended, Leetol opened his snout to rebuke her, but he hesitated, in an honest consideration to the question.

Meraleethe tisked and experienced a slight tremor in her wrists as she secured her own bib and continued harassing the edges of her food.

"It has always been, Morinth: that temper of yours came from somewhere in your rearing, and you and I both know that it isn't a specific event, but the _entirety_ that is to blame. Look at your behavior right now."

"U-Uhm… m-mommy? Morinth, could we not-?" Taliopia was cut off the moment she started speaking.

"Look at _your_ provoking me to such behavior." Morinth shot back, stabbing a chunk of steak roughly and jamming it in her mouth. "I left the lair tonight knowing I was going to have to deal with this, and by this I mean _you,_ and Councilor Leetol. I know how both of you just keep earning yourselves hatchling-guardians of the year awards in how you treat the love of my life, sending her off to the army,"

"-M-Morri-poo, please-"

"-a place she _never_ has belonged, because she's _not_ a warrior, and never will be! She can't even look at the training-mannequins in the barracks without tremoring on her own paws! And you both sent her out with the dragons who leave this city to fight against _Grublins!_ And Orcs!" Morinth pointed her fork. "Have you ever seen what an Orc can do to a dragon, Meraleethe? Well I have! And now, _Tali'_ has too! And you know what? Now she's even _more_ vulnerable! Those nights, where she cries out to me, and sometimes even to _you,_ in the midst of terrible dreams. All day, when she clings to me like a cheeky whelp to its mum because every corner and every turn hides something behind it for her."

All because both of you couldn't deal with a youngling who didn't fit in with everyone around her, and couldn't be _bothered_ to diverge from your perfect schedules, and your perfect lifestyles to acclimate for her. If you would want to have a discussion about how I'm not _good enough_ for Taliopia, than perhaps you should have thought about that before you let your hatchling out of the door without teaching her how the real world works! Or at least educating her to her own sexuality! …But _oops,_ maybe not that last bit. Bloody hell, neither of you must know a lot with that seeing as you obviously haven't laid a paw on each other since Meraleethe got that egg-gut from having Taliopia. It would explain your generous and accepting dispositions. Really, it would."

For a long while, nobody at the table said a word. It was notable, however, the varied silent reactions taking hold in each chair.

Leetol looked positively enraged, though his demeanor was shielded underneath a trained visage he had developed over a long career of politics. He strained himself as his brow twitched, and only held back a scathing torrent of his own by cleanly placing a slice of his food on his tongue to chew.

Meraleethe had eaten half her meal throughout Morinth's outburst. Though she too was no less offended, she only defied her daughter-in-law's words through a cold, unbroken stare.

Morinth grunted, calming herself after another tense minute of trying to defeat Meraleethe with her eyes. She sat back in her futon chair and drank the rest of her glass before slapping her chops and looking at Taliopia.

She sucked in her breath and held it.

Taliopia looked like a tremoring wreck. She had turned a bright pink, almost as rosy-colored as the interior of her wings or her eyes. She bit down on her lower chop tightly and was bundling herself up in her dress, crinkling the lace and bunching the corset.

"...Oh, Tali-wally, I-I'm-" Morinth reached out to her.

"I am **_not_** afraid of training mannequins."

Morinth retracted like she'd touched a hot stove when Taliopia's angrily-tinted and upset voice stabbed out of the silence. It was the first time in a long time she had ever heard the nurse sound so declarative of something.

However, that resolve withered in an instant when Taliopia sniffled and wiped at her eye with a fist.

"-I'm not afraid of mannequins, a-and I do _not_ cling to you like a baby. I-I cling to you because you're the only dragon I've e-ever met who a-a-acts like they *_snrrfff* _-g-give a shit about me."

"Tali', I didn't mean to-"

The chair's feet ground against the floor, and before Morinth could catch her, the nurse had hopped down and bustled away from the table, bowing her head to hide from other patrons and passing waiters as she headed for the building's lavatory.

"Taliopia." Leetol slipped out of his seat and hurried after her.

Meraleethe just kept on eating and staring at Morinth.

"Well?" She asked, swallowing. "Are you pleased with the outcome you've created?"

"Ancestors, you are such a bloody _cunt_, Meraleethe." Morinth spat, sliding her chair back and rushing after the other two dragons.

* * *

{🐉}

The Dark Army ships pulled back maybe an hour after the victory in the Crownhorn Courtyard, harried by dragon airstrikes and pursuing Mole warships. Saxony's fleet was able to extricate faster than the Grublins, who wound up taking the brunt of the fallback attacks and suffered further losses. Urukal (after he had successfully slipped into the night) –would later bluntly, and loudly voice displeasure of the Ape Chieftain's cowardice.

Saxony- mourning the loss of Visigoth in his own way –would promptly respond by spitting on the Orc's boot, and proclaiming that he make love to an oxen to relieve his distress.

In the meantime: Oversight stank like death.

People were saying it would take weeks to clean up and burn all the dead Orcs and Grublins, and even longer to locate all the deceased dragons and Moles. Roughly a quarter of the city wound up burning down before the Ices and Earths got the flames under control with help from Mole relief teams.

The city wasn't the only one to survive the fight with scars, however.

By the time medics took a look at her, Spyra had a broken jaw, a sprained leg, at least two cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder. That wasn't including all the cuts and bruises literally pockmarking her body like a grid of ruination and blood. It took the healers until late at night to fix most of her up, and even then, she still had to walk around with dressings over her face and chest. The feisty swamp hen had complained about in-quote: "_Coming out worse._"

Maybe it was just the emotion of the moment talking, as after all, the medics had been poking her with needles to stitch up her slashes when she had belted it out in an unfortunate Mole's ear…

But she was still very wrong.

_Ignitia_ had nearly died, and only survived due to Terradora's speed and valor.

She had a punctured lung and had nearly suffocated. Her shoulder had been impaled down to the bone, and the amount of lacerations and contusions had all combined to result in frightening levels of blood loss.

What terrified them all was when the healer- in shushed words -told them that one of her eyes had been damaged.

Thankfully, the potions and Mana Gems were able to save it.

However, the healers had said that despite all of the wonderful progress from the gems and elixirs, the scar that particular blow left across Ignitia's face would probably be permanent. Terradora earned many looks when she had answered such news with a rumbling, earth-tremoring chuckle.

"Me and her continue to grow closer each day." The Earth Guardian hummed, lovingly running a paw down some of the myriad scars and faded marks decorating her thorny hide.

Lastly, came the _Fallen_.

The healers had to make a list.

A minor concussion, a cracked rib, a sprained arm and an ankle, a neck injury that prevented him from raising his chin too high, and significant blood loss on account of the tens of cuts riddling his bruised body.

Furthermore, the Fallen had begun to slip into hyperventilation and every single finger on his right hand was broken somewhere on account of all the swinging. The only reason he'd been able to hold his sword was because his hand was literally crunched closed in a lock. It took the dragons and Moles treating him almost two hours to get all the disgusting filth and blood out of his hair, off his body and out of his crevices in a series of baths (of which, the teams were informed that no female dragons could participate, which they were fooled into believing was for modesty purposes. The Fallen was quite upset) –and that wasn't even including the state of his attire.

The Fallen's brand new suit of golden armor had been completely destroyed. The cuirass had been shredded, the pauldrons were gone, and the breaches looked like Swiss-cheese. The armshield was unrecognizable after it had been pounded into a vaguely bean-like shape that looked speckled, like a topographic map of a region covered in foothills. The Handcannon and the gladius sword both were buried somewhere in the courtyard outside under all the dead Grublins.

The medics couldn't understand how his and Spyra's bodies hadn't just given out.

Despite being in separate rooms, they said the exact same thing.

"I got _style _is all."

-She was being herself, and he was quoting her.

The evening rolled on into the night, and then it was all about waiting for the Mana Gems to fix Spyra and Ignitia, and the potions to slowly reknit the Fallen's body _yet again_.

Thankfully, this place had magic.

If he just had his damned gear back, it wouldn't have mattered.

But right now…

The Fallen's chamber had a window overlooking the eastern portion of the city outside. He spent a really long time looking through it at the small sea of rooftops below, and over the cliff walls at the spanning coast and woodlands beyond.

The mountains capping Oversight's south sprawled to the far right. According to the scouts and Terradora, the Solemn Pass just near the city was still held by small remnants of Urukal's army that hadn't been crushed by Cyrila's ambush days prior. The Earth Guardian had muttered a promise to clear them herself before leaving the castle and returning an hour later, as bloodied as she'd been after the courtyard battle.

But she emerged relatively uninjured both from the siege _and_ this skirmish.

She was certainly a fighter.

If he wasn't broken to high hell and in pain, he'd have sported a significant intimidation-boner.

_Ah, well…_

"The tales from Cyrila's unit hold credence." Terradora had quietly grumbled. "I could not locate her body among the dead."

Ignitia had determined that her reaction would be a tear-filled one no matter what extreme the news ended up becoming. Terradora was anathema in interaction with other dragons' emotions, so all she did was grunt and mutter low, battle-oriented encouragements as she watched her fellow Guardian cry.

Of course, the whole lung thing turned the majority of her sobs into nothing but dry wheezes.

The Fallen could still hear her where they were working on him in the other chamber, and the sounds had driven a stake through his heart.

Later that night, tt thundered out and began to rain.

Spyra was actually sort of happy, and when asked why, she said:

"They're not gonna' have fireworks in Warfang with all the drizzle."

And indeed, she had been correct. The capital was stood to postpone the fireworks, and push the Comet Festival back until the storms stopped. In her eagerness over the subject, Spyra actually had begun to talk to the Fallen again, at least somewhat.

Still, things weren't entirely fixed yet.

His purple beastess hadn't challenged being put in a separate room.

Though, she _did_ give him an appraising eye as she was being carried out on a cot via Mole team. So maybe she would reconsider…

He wasn't blaming her either way. Besides, her face was on fire, even if the jaw-thing had been mended by all the magic from the Gems and potions, it still hurt like a bitch, he knew. He had his own shit to mend. His right hand was completely balmed and he couldn't move it. His torso was mummified with dressings and periodically a healer would arrive to have him drink a potion that tasted like feet boiled in liquefied plastic.

He started taking it with milk after he almost threw up on the Mole nurse's blouse from the last dose.

When he found a flake of crusted blood in his hair, he took another bath, and became frustrated enough to yell when a few medics insisted on helping him.

Just because he was beaten to a pulp didn't mean he was a damned vegetable.

_Get the fuck away from me…_

Later, the Fallen sat up in his cot, with a blanket thrown over his now clean body. He sipped a cup of milk in his good hand and watched the raindrops patter down the glass of the window.

Lightning flashed, and when the resultant thunder boomed, he jumped and almost spilled his milk.

Damn it.

The swamps hadn't done it. They hadn't brought back the nasty past that fighting sometimes did. He supposed he and Spyra hadn't been desperate enough, or brutal enough back there, somehow. But old nested grimness was rearing its ugly head. Every shadow looked like a variety of opponents he'd faced in the past. Every loud noise was a threat. Every distant voice was a sign the enemy was near.

He would've said he'd kept his composure.

Which basically meant he didn't _cry._

That wasn't including the hours he spent sitting up in his candle-lit chambers, hugging himself, rocking in fetal positions, mumbling nonsense as his eyes darted around like he was a paranoid sociopath.

He tried to distract himself with the castle he was staying in.

It was beautiful on the inside. Every tapestry was styled to have patterns resembling vines on them, of green and silver. Potted plants were everywhere and many of the walls were overtaken with thin sheets of creepers and roots. The hallways outside were populated by little hummingbirds zipping between the chambers and aisles, and according to the dragons he asked, they were sentient and could speak. They were the guardians of Lilith's little abode, where they tended the artificial forest of greenery spread throughout the castle zealously, watering and pollinating all day and every day.

"It's awfully late. Don't aliens sleep?" A drake who'd brought him another potion asked as he deposited the little clay cup on the nightstand. He was a brilliant yellow-orange in scale color, and had crimson markings resembling dagger strikes gridded all over his face and chest, and his wings were a pure shade of ruby.

"All the people trying to kill me know that I'm _human,_ and all my allies still think I'm E.T." The Fallen rolled his eyes. "You can pronounce _h__oo-man, _right?"

"What's an '_E.T?'-_"

"Forget it. Where'd the last guy go?"

"He's passed out in the medical wing, like most of my fellows. But I have late shift, so here I am." The drake wing-shrugged, and it was only now that the Fallen noticed the terrible bags hanging under his yellow eyes. "You're by far not the worst I've had to treat. You just need potions and time. I have dragons down there missing limbs."

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No offense-" The dragon started to laugh, eyes straying to the human's balmed hand and dressings.

"I had to ask." The Fallen laid back after drinking the horrible liquid. He snatched up the pitcher of milk sitting nearby and downed a quarter of it noisily. "I also gotta' ask: can you bring me another one of these? I think I could drink a lake."

"Sure thing, now that the city's open we can start shipping in supplies from the east." The drake chuckled. "I didn't think alien-uhm_, humans_, liked buffalo milk so much."

The Fallen paused mid-sip and stared inside the pitcher.

Huh.

He thought it had tasted a little… different. It was definitely thicker, now that he was thinking about it.

_Buffalo…_

He shrugged and downed the rest of it.

"How's Guardian Ignitia doing?"

"She's stable." The drake nodded. "It was… ehm… _close._ Lady Ignitia is tough. You should've seen how she looked a few years ago in another battle she fought…"

He could imagine.

The castle was abnormally quiet beside these few interactions, and frankly, it was the only part of the city he had seen that hadn't been ravaged by the fighting. Crownhorn hadn't even been touched by the horrors outside.

The Fallen had at least made himself present when the civilians sheltering in the catacombs and storage cellars were being led out and back into the city proper. Families of Moles were primarily the occupants, though there were some dragons, mostly elderly ones, pregnant females, and younglings. Many of them were crying. Quite a few had lost brothers, sons, daughters, and parents in the battle. There was talk going around that out of the defense garrison of over a thousand Moles native to Oversight, maybe a hundred and eighty were left after the final engagements, which had already nearly wiped the army out.

Times right now felt dark.

Luckily or unluckily, the Fallen had been through enough campaigns to be somewhat prepared for how that impacted him and the people around him.

But really, you never could be prepared for war, no matter how much of it you waged beforehand.

So after a while, the Fallen went to get up to see Ignitia and Spyra.

He was surprised when the door to his bedroom opened, and Spyra stepped through, almost bumping into him_._

"Oh, uhm… -h-hey." He barely heard her say.

"Hey." He croaked. Spyra used her tail to quietly close the door, and she sat on the rug in front of him on her haunches, eyes sweeping around the décor of the bedroom silently. "…Yeah, it's a little, uh… _regal,_ I know."

"They gave you _drapes._" She stuck her forked tongue out at the canopied large bed. "That's girly as fuck, dude."

"Drapes aren't too bad, and neither is a bed."

Spyra hummed and stood up, wandering past him to poke around the room.

"How's your jaw feeling?" He stiffly crossed over to the nightstand, plucking and eating a grape off the little vine the nurses had left him by the milk pitcher.

"Can't be too bad if I'm back to my usual riveting self." Spyra chuckled, giving her mandible a roll with a pained grunt. "It still hurts, though."

"I'm sorry."

"What about your hand?"

"Not broken anymore at least, thanks to the elixirs." He sat on the foot of the bed, watching her as she hiked on her hinds and peered out at the storm through the window. His eyes wandered down her back and settled on her swaying tail. "You heard that Terradora couldn't find heads or tails of Cyrila, right?"

"Ehhyepp. And that means what we've known already." Spyra sighed. "Unless Cynder's actually a cannibal and is planning on making Guardian-Stew, it's kind of hard to imagine what she'd want with them alive like that."

"She's a skilled magic-user, she's probably got some scheme mapped out."

"Yeah, and I'm sure it involves _you._" His heart started to sink before she glanced back at him and smirked. "And _me. _She's after both of us, regardless. Say, you should've seen me and Ignitia, we actually make a pretty good team."

"Ignitia's very good at what she does too." The Fallen nodded. "Plus, I hardly think Urukal's men have anything that can stop a pair of pissed off Fire Dragons."

"Hot to the touch." She licked her thumb-pad and made a hissing sound as she put it on her rear. "At this rate, I won't need any of that training back at the Academy, I'm gettin' more practice in hours than I've gotten in years with my fire breath. These Grublin things really pack a _punch_. …But hey, so do _you,_ one-man-army-boi'."

She abandoned the sill and trotted over to him, the angry expression she'd been wearing lately being replaced by almost an idle beaming.

"I think that's the craziest shit I've seen you ever do, even in Cynder's tower."

"…Uh, I-I tried." He awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. "You have to be passionate about your work, huh?"

"Hell yeah, dude, I feel ya'. After all, such _work_ involves jumping around worlds, battling armies supposedly even _nastier_ than the ass-faces we shredded today, getting loads of females under the sheets…" Spyra sat up on her hinds and rolled a forepaw. "…If I were that dragon, I'd fight pretty hard myself to keep it going, especially if it meant I could tow some hot-tail home afterward."

When he struggled to respond, she waved it off with an amused snicker and made him jump when her paws gripped his knees. The purple dragoness leaned her face closer, little trails of soot rolling out of her nostrils as her pink eyes trailed down his chest.

"Mmhmm, yeah, I was right. Up close it's even more obvious." Even though she was looking at him, she nodded to over his shoulder at the bed. "Those drapes are gay, dude, something I could see a 'ness using, not some interdimensional space-man. Besides, I thought you preferred _nesting_."

"I do." He looked at her chops.

The Fallen saw her roll her fixed jaw and lick her muzzle, her gaze settling on him as her expression turned very serious, and stern.

"Nesting with a _dragoness,_ I mean_._"

"…I do."

* * *

{🐉}

"-_OooOOOHYEAH-~! Yeah~! Ooooorightthere~…._"

Spyra ground her pelvis one last time and wailed as combined fluids began to run in reams from their link and pool in the blankets. The Fallen grunted like an animal and chewed on her neck as he pinned her down atop himself and impaled her deeply. She dipped her neck low and lapped at his lips with a pained look on her face.

"_OoOOoooshit…_" She moaned, lightly biting his mouth and tugging. "…_OooOohhyesss…. I-I needed that…_"

He answered her with a growl and rolled his hips into her pelvis, making her squeak as his expended blade slid among the detritus inside her and tickled her oversensitive flesh.

"…_I-I take it back… ice cream… is _not_ better than this… not at all~…_"

"…_W-What?_" He tiredly blinked.

"_…I'm still gonna' make you buy me a boat full of the stuff when we get back to Warfang…_" She gave a satisfied mewl and rubbed her snout's nose over his own stubby, human one. "…_Like, every single flavor they have too…_"

"They have ice cream there?" The Fallen quietly gasped as he rubbed her hips. "Shit."

"That's what I said."

Eventually, she peeled herself out of his lap. The purple dragon flopped into the sheets by his side and spread her wings underneath herself, eyes locked on the roof of the room.

Neither of them said anything, though the Fallen did sneak his hand over and interlock his fingers in her paw's talons. Spyra took it and squeezed, her tail batting around between her moistened legs as she rode down the last of her sexual high.

The window flashed white after a roll of thunder, revealing in starkness the various dragon-sized pieces of furniture that had been observing their love-making in the dark.

"…So, like… are you gonna' say somethin', or…?" Spyra tiredly asked, raising her head and looking over at him. "They didn't bandage _your_ mouth up. Trust me, I know, you just used it a whole bunch…"

"…Uhm…" He licked his lips, looked down at his soiled lap and then over at the nightstand beside the bed. The pitcher, the grapes, and some cups were still there. "…you want some milk?"

"You have _milk?_" She sat upright from where she'd been prodding her own dribbling vagina like it was some kind of science project.

"Yes, see? On the nightstand."

"Fuck yeah I want milk."

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night OST: Dreams}**_

* * *

So then they drank milk. Sipping their cups, one after the other, and only glancing at one another every so often. The man and dragoness nestled into the sheets and let the storm talk for them.

They still had some time to get to the real conversation. As, after all, Spyra had basically come in here and jumped him only forty or so minutes ago. They'd gone a few rounds, hence the forty minutes. But after a while, it became too much. His ribs started to hurt and her mouth began to go numb.

The medics had said to _take it easy._

It was torturous particularly for her. The Fallen was impressed: perhaps, the purple heroine had an insatiable sex drive that even put _his_ to shame.

"…That big, ugly, inbred Orc broke my jaw." Spyra put down her cup and rubbed at her mandible, as if this news was recent. "You believe that? That's some rank ass shit if you ask me. But did you see? I kicked his can too. I batted him around like he was a ball of yarn! The electricity really did the trick. I wish we had Volteera so she could teach me some stuff."

"Yeah." He laughed, downing a last mouthful of milk and fiddling with his cup. "We'll get her back and she'll teach you everything she knows."

"Hey, did they leave you in here naked, or did you just…?"

"Huh? Oh, no, they, uh… they found a vest and a pair of trousers that fit me. I just didn't want them on. It felt stuffy. I was in that armor all day…"

"Oh, good. Good."

She started playing with something on the edge of her cup and he was tracing the decorative little vines that were carved on the outside of his.

"Y'know during the whole trip from Warfang I was thinking about ways I could, like, maim you, and shit." Spyra admitted.

"…Ah, well, I don't blame you. You're not the first." He mused.

"No, no way you _should_ blame me, who the hell says something like that?"

"Remember whom you speak with." The Fallen quirked a brow at her and grinned. "You certainly wouldn't be the first lady to put my face through a wall. But then again, what are your alternatives? _Corrinthol? _Pah."

"…_Yeah, _haha, or, uh… s-someone like him, right?" Spyra looked away and cleared her throat. "…S-So, uh, do you like ice cream?"

"What?"

"_Ice cream,_ you like it, right?"

The Fallen snickered awkwardly and flexed the wrist his cast was over.

"I haven't had ice cream in a long time." He hummed. "I'd wreck a kingdom for a bowl of that stuff."

"Well, you're gonna' buy me the whole market's worth in the city." She smiled nervously. "Uhm, m-make it up to me?"

"I'll get you whatever you want."

Spyra giggled and jammed her snout into the crook of his neck.

"Spyra?"

"Yep?"

"I'm sorry." He stroked the back of her neck. "For making you so upset."

She grunted, swallowing a comeback before shifting closer to him.

"…Yeah, just… f-forget it, alright? So… can I say what I wanted to say now?"

"I really don't want you to." He shook his head. "I'll talk to you about anything, Spyra, just… just not _that._"

"Well… like, what's the issue? You don't have a problem having multiple mates or nothin', so you shouldn't have a problem with multiple females sayin' it to you." Spyra put down her cup on the other nightstand and twisted over on her side, putting her chin in her paw and doting on him as her tail whipped under the blankets. "Varied sex, but no varied commitment? Look, this is all as batshit mad as it can get, dude, so why not take the full plunge after I just admit that I want you, like, really badly."

He huffed and discarded his own cup, leaning against the headboard and hissing at his injuries. He stared across the room and out the window nearby. Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled soon after.

She followed his gaze and huffed.

"Terradora's still out there." Spyra sighed, stretching her wings. "She's leading the body clean-up teams. They're gonna' pile all the nasty shit outside the gate road and burn them when the storm stops. At least it'll make the smell go away a little quicker."

"Nothing makes _that_ smell go away quicker." He muttered. "…It still isn't over. We have to find the Guardians, finish all the training Ignitia has in store for you, and I'm sure Terradora has things she can teach you too."

"Mmhm." Spyra sounded disinterested as her paw strayed up his arm and she nudged her snout into his shoulder. "…Yo: the 'ness wants some _affection_, so pay up."

"I just fucked you."

"You're the one who said I was your special spoon-derg."

She slid under the blankets until she was straddling him again, blocking out the rest of the room with her orange wingspan as the purple dragoness settled on his lap, minding her horns when she nestled her head under his chin, deflating like a bag full of air as she settled in the nook of his body. Her tail wound around his ankle.

"That Goth-bitch probably stuffed them in a cave somewhere." Spyra mumbled groggily. He rested his hands over her and idly pet down her spinal scutes. "…_Ooo~ that's real nice… keep doing that, babe'…_"

"It has to be somewhere relatively close. She couldn't have carried them across a whole continent. I bet Cyrila and Volteera are either in the forest or the mountains." He said lowly. "Those are the two places I'd hide someone. They're gigantic, hard to search, and they double as rough terrain. We should start looking tomorrow."

"…_sounds like a plan for tomorrow…_" Spyra yawned, scooting and wrapping her forepaws around him to shove as much of his body against her as was possible. "…honestly, I'm just stoked that we didn't die fighting an army. And it's good that Ignitia didn't… y'know…"

"She's too tough to get done in like that." He chuckled, scratching at the bases of her wings. Spyra purred and spread them upwards for him as he worked. "Did you get a chance to talk to Terradora at all?"

"…Nah, not really. She looked me over when the medics were fixing my mouth, but didn't say a whole lot. She looked like she was appraising a piece of hardware, and didn't seem impressed either."

"That doesn't bother you does it?"

"Wait- _what-? _No way dude, fuck her and fuck her face. I'm the shit. She's just too old and crusty to not be jealous of my rockin' hips."

_Sounds like a good plan… she's not _that_ old… _His internal voice salivated.

"I think what _does_ bother me is how Ignitia has been acting." Spyra said. "You know what I'm talking about, right? I mean, I get that my egg was all-important to her and everything, but…"

"It feels a little gross." He blurted.

"Yes! Yeah, like… totally gross." She sighed into his neck. "I already got a mom. She's back at the swamps knittin' shit and whatnot."

"You don't miss them at all?"

"Sure I do, but I know they're still back there, waiting for me, and when I beat the Dark Master and stop the war I'll head down south and have a reunion party. It's not a big deal. My bro's probably having a field day without me beating him up and letting him get eaten by Toadworts."

He silently laughed.

_Jeez', _this dragon…

"I'm taking this means you're willing to talk to me agai-"

"…You make my nightmares stop." She informed him sheepishly, cutting him off. "They only started a few months ago, but they were the worst right before you crashed, and once I got to know you-" She wiggled her hips and giggled when he twitched underneath her. "-_really really know you~,_ they stopped completely, and only came back when I knew we weren't on good terms."

"I'm glad to hear they stopped. Again." He rubbed her back. "…Uhm…"

Spyra sat up on his chest and touched his nose with the tip of her snout.

"Y'know, this whole time, I could've just said it whether you wanted me to or not. And frankly, seein' as I'm dealing with some shit that I don't like about you, if this is gonna' work, you'll need to deal with some shit _you_ don't like either."

"But Spyra that isn't why I-"

"So shut the hell up-" She locked his lips in a brief muzzle-kiss and smacked free. "-and take it."

Spyra turned her head and dipped past his jaw so that her molten breath brushed over his ear.

The Fallen shut his eyes, and willed himself to simply let it happen.

"_I kinda'… sorta'… well…_"

He jumped when a set of draconic fangs nipped playfully at the side of his face. Spyra giggled and buried her nose in his neck, purring.

_…I might, y'know… _love_ ya'. …Just a bit._"

* * *

{🐉}

When morning came, a Mole cleaning lady went into the Fallen's chambers after receiving no response from her knocking, and promptly shrieked when she saw the human bedded with Spyra in a very exposed position. Spyra got startled and, of course, cast a few embers as she scrambled around like a panicking gerbil.

The Fallen covered himself up with a blanket and watched for the next fifteen minutes as another member of the cleaning staff and an Ice Dragon put the bed out. The latter looked between the two radically different occupants, and didn't know what else to say except "_Please be more careful". _

After that, the Fallen tried to use the room's chamberpot, and accidentally kicked the bucket over.

Spyra suggested they burn it to make it go away faster. He couldn't stop her fast enough.

The smell (and the smoke) didn't leave the room for the rest of the day. All the Fallen could do was open the window and fan the door. One of the hummingbirds zipping around the hall outside flew through the cloud, so to speak, and promptly crashlanded on the floor, comatose. A Mole came by later and scooped the poor thing up to take it to the medical bay.

After that fiasco was breakfast, which they chose to eat in the neighboring guest bedroom while theirs aired out.

It looked like something close to waffles, but with berry fillings and powdered sugar. There were sides of folded eggs, pan-fried ham slices, citrus jam and a muffin. He had two helpings. Spyra had eleven.

"Aren't the refugees eating rations?" The Fallen asked as the Mole nurses were departing. "I can't accept this food."

"_Speahk fur yrseff._" Spyra muffled, digging her face into the eggs.

"Not anymore, since the eastern supply routes are open again." One of the nurses smiled reassuringly. "Everyone's getting a good breakfast today now that the rationing is over, we just wanted to treat you both first."

"You're both heroes after all." The other quipped.

Spyra and the Fallen looked at each other as the door closed and they were sealed with the room's quiet.

"She called us _heroes._" She grinned maniacally. "I'm a hero! Hell yeah! I knew we'd win."

"_Suurrrreee…_" He teased, chuckling when she threw a napkin at him.

"I totally did." She winked, leaning over and giving him a restrained peck on the cheek, due to her mouth being full. "I'm glad you're alright, and stuff."

Halfway through, he wondered aloud: "How does it all fit inside of you?"

"I dunno', dude, how does all of _you_ fit inside me, huh?" She whacked him with her tail as they sat on the foot of the bed, ringed by empty plates and bowls. "Call me _Elastic-Fantastic._"

"I see you both found the larder."

Spyra almost choked on a bite of eggs.

Standing in the doorframe was Ignitia.

She looked different.

"Let me guess: only _two_ of those plates are yours, Fallen."

"Indeed they are." He grinned sadly, hiding any impact to himself. As he and Ignitia shared a laugh, Spyra tried to dig into her food more so she didn't have to look up.

Though, it could've been worse, the Mana Gems and the potions had done miracles as their magical natures should have. But still, Ignitia's torso was bandaged to high hell, her shoulder was thrice wrapped in dressings, which hid a line of stitches that had closed up the wound underneath.

The scar the medics had mentioned was there too, a little incision that was only noticeable if you got really close and sought it. It capped the top and bottom of her pretty amber eye like a pair of dagger blades. While certainly battered, at least Ignitia had come out of the ordeal in one piece.

The coughing was concerning, but that was to be expected, given the healing lung. The only thing both he and Spyra noted was that she didn't have her usual scent of cinnamon wafting off of her. Now, Ignitia smelled like a hospital room, he thought.

She looked sadder too.

"You would both would be amazed at the amount of work Terradora got done last night and this morning. The courtyard is almost completely cleared of all those Grublin corpses." Ignitia explained later on, herself seated on a cot one of the cleaning staff had dragged inside as she nibbled on a breakfast muffin. She coughed, covering her snout with a paw politely. She gestured to the muffin. "…T-These are quite good. They use blueberries and raspberries grown inside the castle. There are vines and bushes completely covering some of the storage cellars in the lower levels, oranges and pears too. It's really amazing what the dragons of Oversight have crafted, given their ingenuity."

"At least I can see why everyone calls this place the Realm of Vines. It's like flower-fever here." The Fallen nodded, looking up and noticing a stray growth of pink flowers snaking out of minute cracks in the guestroom's corner ceiling. "Doesn't Oversight have a queen?"

"Yes, her name is Lilith." Ignitia dourly clicked her tongue. "She's… an interesting case."

"Is she inside the castle?"

"Yes, she's in a separate wing that is locked from the rest of the chambers. She resides on the Throne of Vines and tends to the rule and administration of Oversight and a number of nearby villages from there. She hasn't been seen leaving the throneroom in years." Ignitia took a sip of tea. "Terradora is disgusted by her, and thinks she should be removed due to her cowardice and weakness over… well, _personal matters,_ things even I do not understand fully. But what Terra' is forgetting is that Lilith is responsible for the economic and cultural prosperity of the whole realm here, _and_ she has led a number of successful defenses against Malefora's predations in the past, seeing as Oversight is a frontline barrier between the rest of the Dragon Realms and the Dark Continent. This city survived a constant siege for over a year when the first continental invasion happened a few years ago. The gates never fell then."

"So why'd they fall this time?" Spyra asked with her mouth full of eggs as she downed a thirteenth breakfast plate, leaving crumbs everywhere. "Didn't this siege only last like a few weeks or somethin'?"

"They fell this time because _Urukal_ was leading the assault. He is Malefora's most skilled and infamous Orc officer in the entire Dark Army." Ignitia lowered her gaze. "He's the one who broke the gates of Warfang during the last invasion, and sacked many of the entrance districts around Immortal Square. He murdered hundreds, and burned Castle Wyrm. The only reason me and the other Guardians were able to lead a counter-attack and push him back out of the city was because his troops began to tire and his siege engines ran out of ammunition. Even then, he escaped just as he did yesterday. He's not among the dead in the courtyard. He must have slipped through the gates in the night."

"Yeah, he's the douchebag who hit me in the face." Spyra grumbled, swallowing a mouthful of eggs. "Broke my kisser, that rat bastard."

"I heard that you both fought him personally. You've truly proven your skill in battle to have survived a duel with him _and_ his entire army." Ignitia shook her head in wonder. "I wish I had been there to help you two."

"The rear assault wouldn't have happened if you hadn't rallied the rest of the survivors from the gate attack." The Fallen said. "And you protected Spyra long enough for her to reach me and help me defend the castle. You were integral."

"Yeah, against _Night Dragons!_" Spyra went wide-eyed. "And I didn't get to see 'em or kill 'em! Just wait until I get my claws on the ones who did that to you, Ignitia, I'll rip their spleens out!"

"I appreciate your concern, Spyra, but I'm okay now." Ignitia smiled. "It's just a near-death experience, right? Not unusual for those in our professions I'd think." She giggled. "What I really need is a nice, long vaca-"

The Guardian devolved into a series of violent coughs that saw her doubled over in the futon. Spyra leaned forwards, ready to jump off the bed and help her. The Fallen calmly put his plate down and crossed the floor, putting his hand on her shoulder and rubbing until the coughing stopped.

"-_blast it._" She wheezed, wincing as pain shot up her throat. "I've been like this a-all morning…"

"In a lot of the worlds I've been to, if you had a punctured lung, you would be even _worse._ Most people don't have magic so readily available to help them." The Fallen deposited the muffin he wasn't eating on Ignitia's plate and stepped back over to the bed. "Given that you guys have been fighting nonstop for over a thousand years, it's expected the response for injuries would be pretty solidified by now."

"Our healers have certainly made their work cut out for them." Ignitia breathed. "…I haven't dueled another dragon in true battle in… a long time." Her eyes were distant in dreamy thought. "The Nightkin very rarely venture out of the Dark Continent these days: their numbers are too few."

"What's the deal with those scumbags anyhow?" Spyra chewed with her mouth open. "Why are there dragons working _for_ Malefora?"

"They are the descendants of the earliest dragons Malefora promised power to." Ignitia grunted. "Before the war, when she was being groomed to be the new leader of all dragonkind, many began to view her abilities as those of a god's. There was a long seated, unspoken cult that had developed over the years. When she betrayed the Council and the Guardians, a whole army of dragons sided with their perceived diety because they believed that that was the right course of action, that Malefora truly knew what was best for our species to pursue its own destiny."

"What's the average lifespan of a dragon here?" The Fallen asked.

"…Oh, perhaps…" Ignitia thought for a second. "One hundred fifty, to two hundred maximum. The oldest dragon I recall reading of was two hundred and fifty-two."

"Who was that geezer?" Spyra belched.

"…_Hmmph._" Ignitia mused, picking crumbs off her fresher muffin and nibbling on them. "Guardian Scarla Razorwing, Lady of Embers and the One of Red Cloaked Wings. She was my predecessor, the Guardian of Fire before me."

"She disappeared." Spyra hummed. The Fallen stared at her.

"How the heck do you know that?" He blinked.

"She told me back home at my village." She pointed at Ignitia with a fork. "But not much else besides that."

"Scarla disappeared years before I was even born, leaving the Guardian of Fire's seat empty for a number of decades before I began to undertake my classes and training during my hatchlinghood." Ignitia explained. "I was the youngest of the four to begin my path. I was stationed at the Dragon Temple as early as seven years."

"_Seven?" _The Fallen looked flabbergasted. "Most seven-year-olds can't even stand up straight."

"Maybe in other species." Ignitia giggled. "But for dragons, speech and full locomotion are attained at ages three to four. We do not reach our fullest size of growth until about twenty to twenty-five." She gestured to Spyra with her finned tail. "Spyra is in her prime, as it were."

The Purple Dragoness beamed and scooted closer to him to nudge her hip into his, chewing happily on some ham with her tail whipping.

"_See?"_ She muffled. "_I toldh u I wuz hawt schitt._"

"I dedicated my life to understanding the Element of Fire and attaining inner peace. The price for such a thing was… high, but ultimately worth it, I think." The Guardian flexed her wings, deep in thought. "But it was still hard. Life always is at the end of the day-" a cough "-_b-but_ it was like that for all four of us. Cyrila lost everything slowly, like thawing _ice_. Terradora never saw eye to eye with her stubborn family, as stubborn as she was, stubborn like _rock._ Volteera was put into the world and thrust right into difficulty, speedily like _lightning. _All Guardians have their lives reflected in one way or another through that of which they teach, it's what ultimately makes us choose our destiny before we actually step through the doors of the Guardian Temple itself."

"So how does your life mimic _fire?_" The Fallen asked. "Don't tell me it was a _slow burn_. I'm joking."

"_Ugh,_ dude, I breathe fire and even I wouldn't touch that shit, going up in smoke like that." Spyra laughed. "Guess you got _burned._"

"My life is…" Ignitia rolled her tongue in her mouth. "…it's a question I haven't found the answer to yet. But I will, one day."

"Lady Ignitia!"

A dragon appeared in the doorway to the room, pointing down the hall outside.

"Guardian Terradora wants you to see something important! It's the enemy. They're moving outside the city again."

* * *

{🐉}

The storm had only devolved to a slight misting underneath an ugly, gray sky by the time all of them got outside, with only some distant beams of sunlight penetrating the blankets of clouds far east, towards the inner Dragon Realms.

However, none of that was the subject of interest.

_Dreadwings_.

A small flight of them in a standard wide-branch line was flying over the shallows of the coast. Their screeches echoed throughout the distant sky as they ringed around the city and headed for the mountains.

"It is a small detachment. I personally counted ten." Terradora mumbled, her imposingly large form seated beside that of Ignitia's. So far she hadn't bothered to turn around and look at either Spyra or the Fallen, both of whom lingered nearby with their gazes locked to the clouds. "They head for the mountains, over Solemn."

"There isn't a doubt in my mind as to the cause of why." Ignitia grimly noted, her eyes scanning the beasts as they shrank towards the peaks. "Cynder is keeping Cyrila close to where she was captured."

"If the Cloud Ripper wished for you not to know, she would not have ordered her lackeys to put on a show." Terradora quietly leanied closer to her. "If you follow them, you will be walking into a trap."

"What other choice is there? If Cynder kills the Guardians, Warfang will be helpless to raise new soldiers." Ignitia huffed. "Whatever she is doing requires Cyrila and Volteera to be alive. Our window is there, Terra', but it's closing."

"Me and my boi' are good enough to head up there and kick some tail." Spyra announced, wrapping the Fallen's good wrist in her tail and yanking him along to stand beside the Guardians. "Soon, we might even be able to get the cast off his hand."

The Fallen grinned down at her, and Spyra smiled.

_Ah…_

This was nice.

Familiar too.

"You, nor Ignitia, nor the-" Terradora paused, and her drab eyes settled angrily on the Fallen. He flicked a smile and waved cheaply.

"How are ya'?" He asked.

"-nor the _parasite, _are in any state to go out and fight again. I will lead a strike team, and we will get Cryrila back."

"Terra', _none_ of the soldiers here have any chance against Cynder." Ignitia shook her head. "Only _you_ do, and who do you think Cynder will have the Dreadwings focus on as she picks off your allies and leaves you alone, in the cold, against a flight of ravenous beasts and _herself?_"

"If the _parasite_ can get two cents in: Cynder knows the only people who are going up into those mountains are us." The Fallen said. "She wants to capture the both of you in addition to Cyrila and Volteera, but most of all: she wants _Spyra_, for nothing good, I'd think."

"_Pffft,_ don't be modest…" Spyra rolled her eyes and hip-bumped him. "She wants me dead, it's _you_ she wants up there. Why do you think all of her monkeys have orders to take you alive?"

"_What?_" Terradora turned around and leaned over them both. "What do you mean the Cloud Ripper wants it alive?"

"_It._" The Fallen dug his fingers into his hair. "I'm an _it _now. Jesus Christ, lady, you're hotter than a sauna in July, but you've got a heart colder than all those snowy peaks back there. I think we got started on the wrong foot, so maybe we should shake on it!" He held up his hand.

"You little-"

"_No~!_" Ignitia squealed, propping up between Terradora and him, and smiling sheepishly at the prior. "I-I wouldn't recommend such action, for e-either of you…"

"Ignitia! Stand aside so that I can paint the battlements with the alien's innards." Terradora tried to angle around her, snarling when the Fire Guardian stopped her with held out wings and paws each time. "_Move!_"

"I wouldn't advise touching the Fallen, Terra'! He has- u-uhm-"

"A lethal skin disease!" Spyra proclaimed. The Fallen gawked.

"What the fuck, no I do-"

"_Real_ lethal, like, flesh-eating level." The purple dragon persisted. Terradora stopped struggling and glared at her. "It's amazing he's still alive. Really. He's felt his own life flash before his eyes a whole buncha' times now!"

"…_Hmmph._ If he is so _lethal_ than why are _you_ unaffected, purple one?" Terradora snorted. "The parasite is practically smothered in your scent. You have obviously been quite… _close_ with it as of late."

The Fallen giggled like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Spyra grinned through a blush and bumped him with her hip.

"You shut up~." She smiled, biting her chops. "Just 'cause I started that gravy train again don't mean I don't have my eye on you since Wyrm."

"What happened to Wyrm Castle?" Terradora blinked, looking to Ignitia.

"That was where our wounds were attended to after we came from the south-" Ignitia started to explain.

"Oh, everybody caught Sir-StickemAll here bangin' Morinth and her lesbo nurse lover in the room." Spyra dismissively blathered out. "I guess I can't _entirely_ blame him, in hindsight. Speakin' of _hind,_ Taliopia _does_ have a nice arse', now that ya' mention it."

"Too fine and too tight." The Fallen proudly put his hands on his hips. Spyra spit fire at his feet and made him dance. "_The fuck?!_"

"Just because I'm willing for some open-relations here doesn't mean you can be snide about it, either."

"That's a lot of prerequisites, girlie."

"I'm a high maintenance 'ness. Deal with it."

Terradora looked like she had just been told that the center of the world was made out of pure marmalade. Spyra could've sworn she heard an eagle cry out somewhere near the mountains in the backdrop.

"….T-The alien…" She croaked. "…h-has… engaged in _physical relations_ with dragons?"

"I see myself as a bit of a connoisseur if you can believe it." The Fallen shined his knuckles on his chest and sniggered childishly.

"_-WHAT-?!_" Ignitia slapped her paws over her snout as soon as the squawk left her mouth. "…n-nobody told me about… about _that. _Fallen! Y-You- You _mated_ with Morinth?! _And Taliopia?!_"

"The _lesbians?_" Terradora gasped in disgust.

"Bygones." Spyra shrugged. "I'll admit, I mighta' overreacted a little, got a bit mad, burned some shit, but, honestly… I got _human-fever~._" She licked her chops and leant into the Fallen's leg. "Y'know when you have a good enough sense of self-satisfaction in your life, that you feel like your queefs will smell like mint?"

Ignitia landed on her rump and clawed at her face, distraught, and unsure of what else to do or say. She started coughing as her lung acted out. Terradora's eyes were glassy as she focused on something invisible to the rest of the party. Thusly, it was with shellshock that she rose and started trotting away.

"…Excuse me," The Earth Guardian growled, shouldering past Ignitia with a flush invading her green snout. "but I have to go somewhere else and vomit."

"So, does that mean we're sticking with the _original_ plan of all _four_ of us going, or are you sittin' it out, girlfriend?" Spyra called.

Terradora gave this mewling noise of rage but otherwise didn't respond. Ignitia was still holding her face and staring at the two of them in the meantime, even after the Guardian of Earth vanished inside one of the preliminary towers on the wall.

"Well, as long as nothing changes in the short time between then and now, I'm assuming we're _all_ going to save Cyrila." The Fallen said. "I'll head to the medical wing and see if they can give me anything to get my hand under control quicker and we'll be of-"

"_Just how many dragons have you mated with?!"_ Ignitia wailed.

The Fallen paused, looked at the sky, and then began to count his fingers.

When he got to the second hand, she whined and smacked his arms down with her paws, eliciting a little '_Ow' _–from him when she hit the right one.

"That's horrendous! A-And immoral! And _disgusting!_" She cried.

"-_And_ hot as hell." Conscience appeared behind her, offering addendum with a raised, inquisitive finger.

The Fallen's death-glare past her wing was enough to get the apparition to go scratch.

"Yeah, hits hard the first time ya' hear it." Spyra wing-shrugged as she glanced around the city below with interest. But mostly, it was to shield the light, pissed-off growl grumbling in the back of her throat. "_By-gonnnessss…_" She sang lowly, watching a few dragons zip over some roofs near the courtyard.

"T-This is unprecedented-! A-And foul-! And-" Ignitia's mouth was rolling so quickly that it escaped her control. "…and sweet dear Ancestors, y-yesterday I- I tried to-"

"Yeahyeah, listen, it's nothing I haven't heard before. Trust me, everyone's said _everything_ to me, and my answer's still the same." The Fallen shrugged. "It all works out because me and my friends are just that badass and other people aren't."

Spyra snickered.

"Badass like me?" She grinned.

"Badass like you, my finely curvaceous source of derg-taco."

Ignitia's jaw dropped and Spyra snorted in a violent, sudden giggling fit.

"-T-That's why you were so upset earlier…" The Guardian looked at her. "…T-That's why we battled one another in the Dark Army encampment, and that's why I've been experiencing-"

"-probably the first flow of a river in a valley so dry, cacti had grown?" Spyra chimed. "Yeah, Ignitia, everyone can tell."

"And a _fine_ valley at that…" The Fallen hungrily blinked at Ignitia's hips.

The Guardian turned redder than her own scaley coat, before she squealed and ran away from them, a flustered mess.

"She'll be back." He winked at Spyra.

"Like I said, no snideness." She whacked his cast with her tail, and he painfully grunted. "So, off to save a Guardian, and right after the biggest battle I've ever been a part of, the _only_ battle I've been a part of. Dang."

"In this line of work, breaks are something you'll soon learn to cherish. Kind of like ice cream. Except it melts. Really fast." He shivered, laying his good hand on her shoulder before spinning around and limping back down from the walls. "Have you ever fought in snow before?"

"It used to flurry during the cold seasons back home sometimes." Spyra mumbled, her gaze locked on the distant arrays of snow-capped mountains on the horizon. "All the dragonflies thought I was a super-dragon because they all couldn't move in the chill and I was always fine. Being a heat-based chick, and all that."

"Well, I hope that internal-oven of yours will help you through it." He called back. "You've gotten your taste of large-scale urban combat, Spyra, just be sure to keep your head on and be ready for _Winterized war. _It's two entirely different animals."

"B-But nothing I can't handle, right?" She shoved off from the merlons and ran after him. "_Right?_"

* * *

{🐉}

He'd ended the battle in one of the last street skirmishes that had bubbled out in the wake of Urukal's line breaking. When the Orcs' offensive against the castle had been shattered, thin bands of survivors had scattered throughout Oversight. Colcrus had led a Wing in charge of hunting Grublins.

He had been fighting while wounded for hours it felt like. The drake had suffered a slash on his forearm, a bludgeoning impact across his face from an Orc's shield, and the tip of his snout-horn had been broken off during the disaster above the Pass.

Nobody seemed quite keen on whispering about anyone else in the Wing except for him, but mostly that was because word had gotten around that he'd engaged in melee combat with the Terror of the Skies, and had lived.

Now, Colcrus wouldn't have called what happened a '_melee fight' _–merely because he'd stood up, and Cynder had practically bitch-smacked him from her path like he was an annoying fly. But he didn't try to tell other dragons or the Moles about the truth.

Again, mostly that was because it gave them a small sliver of _hope._

Hope, because someone, anyone, had stood up to Malefora's champion and lived to tell the tale.

He felt a little guilty accepting that title. It didn't sit right with him, especially after all the horrors his fellows had endured.

His original unit had been annihilated, and so the newer one was a conglomerate of remnants from over ten different Wings. Nobody had been _officially_ named Captain. Colcrus only held leadership status because all the officers in these elements were either missing or had been killed.

That meant that he also technically was in charge of even _Blizzren,_ which was mad, because the mountain drake was almost twice as old as he was. _That_ felt weird.

Yet Blizren had left the war relatively unscathed, minus a few bruises and scratches.

There was a drake named Ferrag who had lost an eye and one of his paws. He would probably never fight again. Another male, Losedva, was paralyzed from the hip down after a building had collapsed on top of him and his squad. A dragoness named Terea had to be held down as a team of healers literally scooped her intestines back inside of herself and sewed the incision that had gutted her closed.

Colcrus was a veteran of the war, and had been so for several years. Not once in his career had he been part of a battle so vicious and bloodthirsty. He had killed more Dark soldiers in a night than he had in his entire life up until that point.

His normally jocular attitude had turned into a more sterile shell of its earlier incarnation, and it seemed he was having difficulty smiling at anything.

That could've just been short-term trauma giving him shit, but something about it felt sticky… and that bothered him.

"-Guardian Terradora! I didn't see you-"

"_Move._"

Colcrus grunted when the huge dragoness shouldered him from her path as she stormed down a hallway. He narrowed his eyes and watched her depart with his tail looping bands in felinoid annoyance.

He knew it was unwarranted, as Terradora had gone through even more than he and his squads had during the battle, but still…

"Excuse me."

He gasped as Ignitia shoved him out of the way too and hurried down a different hallway.

"…Jeez'…" He muttered, turning a corner and getting on with his path. The Ice Dragon passed an arch and skirted one of the chambers being used as a medical shop. The pained moans of bleeding Moles on tarps lowly crept through the air. "Bliz'? Hey."

The older dragon turned around from where he'd been presiding over one of the wounded, and his eyes went wide when he met Colcrus' gaze.

"Colcrus!" He exclaimed, moving forwards and linking paws with him. "-I-I thought-"

"I wasn't so sure either. Don't worry about it." Colcrus grunted, nodding at him. "How are you?"

"Alive, and I'd greatly think of that as something to smile about." Blizren lowered his voice, giving a cautious eye to the wounded nearby. He angled his head for the door. "Let's talk somewhere else."

They came out onto the defense palisades topping the castle's many walls after a brief walk. The wind was cold and howled lowly as Colcrus mounted between a pair of merlons, and gazed mournfully down at the pillars of soot rising from the city below.

"The Dark Navy retreated, so some of the Wings have started gathering seawater to put out the fires." Blizren said. "At least it's helping, a bit anyway. So, I heard you were promoted."

"…u-uhm…"

"Yeah, listen, I know. I'm not saying it's… _good- _well, it _is,_ but… but not at the same time too, because… all those other officers..." Blizren coughed. "-It's war. Someone has step up when the dragon you look up to isn't there anymore. You'll make a fine Captain."

"Nobody told me I was becoming a Captain." Colcrus snorted. "I'm refusing, you know, if someone does give the offer."

"I hardly think it'll be an _offer_." Blizren stretched his wings and grunted. "But, uh… everyone's doing things right now that they don't want to. It's the price of winning."

"Then why does it feel like we lost?" Colcrus pointed at the city below with his tail. "Look at this. We didn't _win._ We just stalled the Dark Army. All they're going to do is come back with even more Grublins, and they're going to finish the job. I was listening to what some of the scouts were saying. Didn't you hear? Lady Ignitia was attacked by a Wing of _Nightkin._ If those freaks are coming back, then this war is about to get even worse."

"Ignitia was attacked by Night Dragons, you were attacked by _Cynder._" Blizren shook his head. "It's a time of instances no one could dream of."

"So what?"

"So," Blizren put a claw on his shoulder. "you need to be _resilient._ Especially now, Colcrus. You have all kinds of dragons looking to you for leadership and guidance. While you were listening to the gossip, I'll have you know I heard a fair deal of mutterings myself. All the Wings speak highly of you. You kept a lot of wyrms alive yesterday."

"Tell that to the ones I lost." Colcrus huffed, pouting on his elbows. "…This is supposed to be Cyrila's unit, Bliz', not mine. I don't have the experience or tactical skills she does. I can't do this."

"Unless Cyrila miraculously comes back, you _have to._"

"Miraculously?"

The two dragons looked at one another.

Blizren broke the contact with a disparate huff and shifted on his feet.

"…I don't say that without caring." He murmured. "Lady Cyrila is very important to many of the dragons in our unit, as she is to me and you. But Colcrus, I've been doing this for a long time, and I need you to know that you have to be strong and prepared for the kind of possibilities we're dealing with here."

"So you think she's dead? Is that it?" Colcrus sneered, hopping down from the wall. "That's ludicrous."

"And unwanted, more unwanted than anything right now." Blizren said. "All I'm saying is that you need to be able to cope. I truly believe Cyrila is alive, and I also believe the Guardians and the Purple Dragon are going to find her. They're organizing a party to go out into the mountains. They think that's where Cynder is keeping her captive."

"What reason does the Cloud Ripper have to take a Guardian _alive?_" Colcrus blinked, and Blizren shrugged.

"I don't know, but they're bringing the _alien._"

Colcrus sat on his haunches and stared.

The _alien. _It took a second for him to piece together what Blizren was saying. Everybody was talking about the Fallen, the champion who had come from the sky.

"Did you see him fight? They're saying he and the Purple Dragon single-clawedly stopped Urukal's whole front line." Blizren continued. "I only got some glimpses myself, but… Ancestors, I've never seen anyone fight like those two before, not even Lady Cyrila, not even-" He paused, looking around to make sure he wasn't within hearing shot of anyone else. "-_not even Terradora,_ I think, could pull that off."

"And the Fallen's going with them to find Lady Cyrila?"

"Yes." Blizren nodded. "They're literally our last hope here. None of the others can go. They're saying Cynder's preparing an ambush up in the peaks, and all the Wings have been shattered."

"Maybe they all have, but I'm still standing."

"Where are you going?" Blizren stepped aside as Colcrus trotted past him. "Colcrus?"

"I'm going to join that team and help find Lady Cyrila."

* * *

{🐉}

There was a quiet knock on the door.

"_Terra'? Are you in there?_" –Came Ignitia's muffled voice from the other side.

The immense Earth Guardian offered the arch a lazy glance, before grumbling out an affirmative grunt and nothing more.

Ignitia slipped into the room and shut it off behind herself with her tail. She turned to her comrade sister and beamed a warm, albeit timid smile.

"There you are." She said decidedly.

"Here I am." Terradora mumbled, water slapping as she used her mouth to toss away the polish rag back into a basin bowl. "Apologies, I had to rid myself of the stench. I have been hauling dead Orcs to the pyres for hours."

"A good leader always takes themselves to the same fronts and chores as those beneath them. It is this way unless we all want to sink into a pit of privilege, I'd say that making the sacrifice is the noblest thing we could do when we have no one to battle." Ignitia hummed, trotting closer and seating herself beside the larger Guardian.

"Then it is with great luck that there are no shortages of those to battle these days." Terradora huffed. "This minuscule labor is a flagrant waste of my applicative talent."

"The talent that had you murder that Nightkin with his own horn?"

"That talent that has assured you your own breath, and me your continued company." She nodded sagely. "But excuse me for mentioning breath. How's the lung?"

"Better, at least than it was when I first came to." Ignitia coughed a bit into her paw and cleared her throat. "How are _you_, Terra'?"

"Long and ready to leave this accursed place." Terradora grunted, eyeing some of the roots overgrowing her room's western wall. Somehow, none of the dustings of the wild clashed with the regal furnishings throughout the castle. "How we have reached a point where such delicate beauty has been entrusted to the stewardship of a perverted monkey from the sky, and a queen whose never even seen her own vagina is beyond me. We have truly sunken over the decades as a people, Ignitia. I swear that one day I will return the dragons to their rightful place as masters of this world."

"Perhaps such is a goal that must be worked towards _collectively._" Ignitia politely redirected the subject. Terradora had never written a manifesto only because she detested writing what was not already pre-written and ready to be read. "We've missed you at the Academy, and the courses of your element have been substituted by Cyrila most of these days. I think she'd be grateful if the workload was lessened, and… _I _would be grateful to have such great company returned to my otherwise stressful days."

"Hmmph. How has the Hen of Winter taken to my pupils?" Terradora tried to ignore Ignitia's subtlety and flashed her a rare grin. "I am confident that her _charming_ demeanor has earned her much love and affection from them."

"Actually, Guardian Cyrila has expressed that she likes your students better than her own. While the extra paperwork has been stressing her enough for her to put her horns through a wall, she's taken the second role with gusto." Ignitia chuckled. When Terradora looked at her incredulously, she wing-shrugged. "She claims that your zero-tolerance policies for shenanigans are quite effective in, and I quote: '_Grinding down their rambunctious, hormonal needs for disobedience.'_ -…I'd be inclined to agree with her."

"Mm. I am surprised. I thought you would dread the idea of myself manufacturing little me's to repopulate the realms." Terradora chuffed.

"Well, it'd help if you _smiled_ more often. And if you stopped hitting people."

"I missed your consul more than home." The Guardian admitted as she sheepishly pawed the floor of her lavish room. She looked around, gesturing to the draped bed and the massive curios cabinets stocked with all kinds of elaborately colorful and feminine outfits. Dresses, gowns, blanket-cones for over a dragoness' haunches designed to accentuate the hips. "Do you see? The lovely Queen herself has banished me to a land of stereotypical objectification. I think she actually _wants_ to spite me, probably because I can't stand her childish antics."

"Oh, goodness, Terra' I hardly think that was the intent." Ignitia tisked, and gave her a smile as she moved over to one of the cabinets and opened it. "As much as you would never offer the suggestion anything but spite: you know, you would look lovely in some of these dresses."

"….." Terradora blinked after a dreadfully long pause, sniffing, as she stepped over to a table and swung her tail around to start affixing the straps of the massive mace-head she normally kept there. "…I will do my utmost best to forget that you said that."

"I'm just teasing!" Ignitia laughed, shutting the cabinet. "Remember how I used to drive you insane when we were younger? Bringing you to those manicure stations in the markets back in Warfang? Your talons always looked so pretty back then, black, shiny, like pure onyx."

Terradora grunted when Ignitia reached over and took up one of her big, green paws in her palms and spread her fingers to examine her nails. Nowadays, they were a far-shoot from the times she spoke of. They were dulled, foggy with use and cracked. Terradora had taken to roughly filing them on grind-wheels to effective sharpness for use in battle.

"I was never meant for the life of a _'hen'_." Terradora spat that last word out like it physically tasted sour, and took her paw from Ignitia as she finished strapping down her mace. The weapon swooshed as she brought her tail back to its normal place and gave it a few testing whips, her unnatural strength making the large warhead look weightless. "Pretty dresses, kempt talons and teeth and polished scales. Bah. All hatchling riff-raff meant to appease to a male-dominant cultural programming. One of the perks to being of my rank, is that even if I was weak enough to become such prey, everyone is barred from fucking me, and fucking _with_ me, if you catch my drift."

"Ahem, err… _yes,_ I-I understand." Ignitia blushed, coughing and looking back at the door with a nervous swallow.

"I imagine you have much to tell me, about your journey south, your encountering of that alien freak and that excuse of a savior."

"She's not an _excuse_." Ignitia quickly lashed, earning a glance from Terradora. "…I'm sorry. I know that your first impression of Spyra was less than shining, but she is golden of heart and quite the fighter."

"I did not doubt her abilities in combat. She blunted the charge of over a thousand infantrymen with only one other warrior assisting her. By definition, she is of a level where only the mad or foolish could assume weakness." Terradora said. "However, skill equals not who the dragon is in terms of _identity._"

"Sounds like someone I know." Ignitia smiled.

"If you say so." Terradora started strapping her pauldrons on. "The south?"

As Ignitia recounted everything that occurred, the Earth Guardian completed a transformation back into her usual armored, war-prepped self. Ignitia found it a miracle that she had been able to witness even briefly the un-adorned, true dragoness beneath all the metal and stubbornness.

"Maybe my opinion is not as low as it first was." Terradora admitted when Ignitia got to the parts about the Fallen's deeds. "But the hairless monkey is still a bastard."

"Y-Yes, i-in a sense."

"Ignitia? You are shivering. Should I hail the healers?"

"_No!_ No, it's… ehm… q-quite alright, Terra', I'm just a bit tired, after all the fighting yesterday." Ignitia grinned awkwardly. "Not enough though that I'll sit out the excursion! I'm not letting anything stop me from rescuing Cyrila."

"I was not going to try and stop you." Terradora nodded.

"You're a dragon of few words normally, the pauses make it hard to tell." Ignitia teased, rubbing the back of her neck.

"Few words." The Earth Guardian sniffed and looked down at the floor. "Indeed."

"…Maybe, for at least a little while, before we leave, it might be nice to take a walk through the County Hall? Check up on the wounded, stop by some windows for some _tactical observations,_ yes?" Ignitia stood up and edged for the room's door. "What do you say?"

"I hardly have time for-"

"_Terra'._"

The two Guardians stared at one another for a moment. Ignitia smiled and nudged open the door, holding it ajar as she swept her tail for the space beyond.

"Did you have breakfast yet? The nurses are serving muffins in celebration of the relief."

"…Mm." Terradora narrowed her eyes at the southern wall. "I still must meditate before I am to take flight for war. It is standard ritual for my process after I have armored for the day."

"They have blueberry ones."

Terradora sniffed again and started walking towards the door.

"…But perhaps it would be… _instructive_ to sample the muffin rations."

* * *

{🐉}

"-_I found it!_"

"Hold on, I'm coming to you."

The Fallen hiked through the mounds of stinking dead Grublins, waving flies from his face as he stepped over arms and used chests and guts as steps.

"At least one part of it all didn't get completely ruined." The Fallen bent low and took the golden gladius blade from the Mole's paws, giving it a studious twirl before testing the familiar weight. "Thanks for the help, sir."

The human trekked back through the mounds of corpses, his gaze sweeping appraisingly as he went, though not without a good tinge of mournful sadness.

Crows cawed as they frequented wherever cleanup crews vacated. The ugly buzz of flies was so consistent that it sounded like a constant drone of unnatural static on the wind, and the smell of opened flesh was appalling as it mixed with the salty tinge of hundreds of unwashed bodies piled in the same spot.

Teams of dragons wandered around tugging wagons that Moles rolled tens of dead Orcs and hundreds of dead Grublins into to form piles for the pyres outside the gates. True to earlier words from Ignitia and Spyra, a good portion of the square had been cleared of the dead, and at least by this point one could see the cobblestone underneath the blanket of death.

"I can't believe you found that thing." Spyra pinched her snout as he walked past her and started back towards the castle. She fell in step beside him with an annoyed snort. "-_Ugh!_ Shit stinks out here…"

"The rain made it worse, but this is pretty tame. Just be thankful this battlefield hasn't had time to age." He shuddered. "Some smells were never meant to be around the living."

"I hear that." She nudged his flank. "So when are we leaving?"

"Soon, I think. We just need to find Terradora and Ignitia and we can get underway for the mountains." He paused as they walked. "And, I should talk to some of the armorers and see about a new suit, or at least some chainmail."

"It's too bad, that suit was radical." Spyra eyed his jump-sleeved chest, remembering all the bronze and golden colored plating. She sneered and stopped next to a mound of corpses, grunting as she wedged her claws under a body and flipped the diminutive thing over. "All thanks to these ugly bastards."

The Fallen peered over her and grimaced as he took his own chance to examine the enemy.

The Grublin was positively hideous. It was covered in green, clammy flesh riddled with moss, chunks of dirt and vines, all of which were ingrown and part of its very body. It didn't' have a mouth, but instead possessed a series of orifices across where its jaw and throw were supposed to be, sealed off from one another by bands of mossy roots.

Leather padding and cloth strappings concealed parts of its short form, and a pair of blood-red eyes stared emptily up at them from the top of its triangular skull.

"I didn't think it was possible for somethin' to smell _worse_ than the Apes." Spyra huffed, crinkling her snout as she tore away with him. "You ever see anything like a Grublin before?"

"Similar shit." He muttered, thoughts straying as he looked at all the bodies.

A pair of Moles trudged in the opposite direction with a stretcher extended between the two of them. One of their fellows lie dead across the cloth, his limp arm dangling like the stick of a pendulum off the poleside.

Spyra glared grimly at the corpse as they passed, and for a long while her pink gaze appeared hazy as some unknown thoughts stormed around in her head. The Fallen looked at her.

She'd had a lot of time to change ever since he had found her in the swamps. It had been over a month since he had crashed here, and in that brief span, the purple dragon had characteristically shifted into something different.

Something more hardened.

"Hey," He said, earning her longing gaze. "never stop the ass-kick train for anything, you got that?"

Spyra's dreadful aura bled from her as a little bounce worked its way into her step. She giggled and brushed her hip across his own.

"Brutha', I don't think I could stop that shit even if I _wanted to._" She snarkily winked. "Besides, I totally killed more Dark soldiers yesterday than you did."

"Did not."

"Did _too,_ don't be a sore loser."

"…_did not._" He muttered.

They reentered County Hall and passed through the stringent crowds of workers and soldiers going about. Dragons and Moles alike stared at them, mumbling all kinds of things such as recounts of their place at the front of the line in the last defense, the rumors that they had survived a personal engagement with Urukal the Orc Warlord himself.

The Fallen had to talk a few ears off, but eventually, after some time, he was able to get together a little group of blacksmiths who started taking measurements and scavenging for him.

Spyra watched from the background as one of the old, dusty forges underneath Crownhorn's very feet roared to life, and the Moles slapped together a quick solution with what they could.

"I know." He said, noticing the scrutinizing look she was giving him as he walked over. He patted the chainmail. "It certainly isn't what I showed up with."

A pair of pauldrons too small for a human, a vest of mail and breast padding, a chain skirt over greaves of plated knees and thick boots made the Fallen's new rig.

"For you? I don't think it'll matter." She grinned. "Though that gun-thing you had was the shit…"

A ragged cough caused them both to jump. It was enough that the Fallen subconsciously reached for his gladius.

In the corner of the forge chamber was an old, ratty-looking dragon who was missing an entire wing. He sneered at them as he nursed a diminishing series of hacks in his breast.

"_Ew._" Spyra mumbled, turning and trotting away. "Creepy old guy alert."

"Have you seen him before?" The Fallen fell into step beside her, glancing once back at the elder.

"I think I heard some of the others blabberin' that he's like the Queen's last royal guard or somethin'. I saw him lurking around County Hall last night after they patched me up and I was coming to your room." Spyra nodded. "I think Terradora mugged him or something, 'cause he glared at her when I saw them cross paths. I mean, he glares at _everyone_ I think, but it looked worse with her. It's probably nothing. He's just one of those sorry windbags who wasted his glory years being a one-pump-chump and is jealous of younger people for having full locomotion in their fingers."

"…No, there's something off about that fellow." The Fallen scratched the stubble on his chin. "I can't quite place it right now, but I have a feeling he knows this castle pretty well."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

_**{Halo 4 OST: Never Forget}**_

* * *

It started to drizzle again as the mid-morning approached, and it coated Oversight in a thin glisten even through the soot rising from the extinguished fires.

The Fallen had insisted he help with body cleanup in the meantime it took the Guardians to prepare themselves, but Ignitia had popped out of the woodwork and had immediately shot down the suggestion.

"If you waste all of your energy on repair work, you'll have none left for the fight." She stiffy said. "Which you and I both know: there _will be_ a fight up there."

"I didn't want to look lazy, I guess." He shrugged. "You look great, by the way. If I didn't know what happened yesterday, I wouldn't believe it."

Ignitia smiled weakly and bowed her crown, soot wafting from her snout.

"Fallen, I wanted to speak with you, about yesterday I mean." The Guardian admitted as the two of them walked along the top of the palisades, ignoring the water wetting their forms. "I feel that any strenuous efforts of apology would be unneeded, given the way our journey has gone from the beginning up 'till now."

"It's a lot for you to acclimate to." He stated, earning a surprised glance. "Me, and Spyra coming back, and even yourself."

"T-Things have certainly changed." She swallowed, her eyes dilating when he gestured with his hand at her. His toasty, soft, skin-covered hand that had electrocuted her with bolts of warmth hotter than her own fire. Against Ignitia's awareness, her tail swung over as she walked, and hovered in a slight curl behind his ankles, as if it was making to snake around his legs. "And I won't feign certainty with what has changed specifically inside myself. But about what happened: I'm willing to professionally see it off. T-To, ehm… ignore it's background commentary, i-if you will."

They both stopped along the embattlements, and she looked at him with a very fragile, stern expression.

The Fallen's eyes lowered when he saw her tail slowly curling around his ankle. Ignitia sneezed cutely and didn't seem to notice, soot now redoubling in its volume as it crawled out her nose.

"_-P-Professionally, yes._" She reiterated with another tiny sneeze.

He smiled.

"I have no issue with that at all, Ignitia."

"Good. Yes, very good." The Guardian shook her head more times and with more effort than was necessary. "Well, I also just wanted to say that you were right. We saved Terra', and we saved the city. You were the one who kept saying we'd do it, and so now it turns out that we have done it. A mighty feat, if I do say so myself."

"Listen," He put a hand on her finned shoulder, making the dragoness shudder, and gulp. "the valor of this goes to you and Spyra. Without you, the counter-attack would never have happened, and without Spyra, me and those pikemen couldn't have stopped Urukal. Really, the two of you won this fight, not me, I just helped by killing a few Orcs."

"And by bein' the cheerleader." Spyra quipped as she sauntered past them. "We should've grabbed you a pair of palm-palms from the market in Warfang while we were at it."

"Silence, you." He shook a fist at her as she cackled. The Fallen grinned at Ignitia. "I'll have to try harder this time. I can't let you ladies walk away with all the credit."

"Society's pillars are always _female._" Terradora growled as she trailed after Spyra. The Earth Guardian glared past her spiky wing. "And even when those pillars are not, there is always one not far away from it."

"We haven't had a moment for proper introductions, you and I, madame'." The Fallen called after her.

"You have introduced yourself _enough._"

"Give Terra' some time, to acclimate, as you said." Ignitia sheepishly chuckled. "She may not admit it, but she has been steaming over these stories about you and Spyra's battle skills."

"I respect only what I witness." Terradora snarled. "So far, all I have witnessed from the likes of you two is disrespect and adultery."

"God damn it, again with the adultery shit." The Fallen slapped his forehead. "What the fuck?"

"I won't even raise the poll seeing as no one else here but myself will carry you." Ignitia leaned down beside him, surprising the human by even going so far as to nudge him with her plump, umber hip. "Come along, Fallen, you promised to help save my sister, so now the time has come."

"Mm. Do, I uh…" He mumbled as he slowly crawled over her flank, and leaned his face closer to the side of her jaw. "…do I get a prize if I help you get her back?"

Ignitia paused, and for a moment, he was expecting the usual blunting of his advances.

To his amazement, the Fire Guardian hummed a bit of laughter and wiggled her waistline, grinding her scutes into his greaves as she nudged his face with hers.

"It _depends~._" She giggled, still a bit hesitantly. "On what you want."

"_Brrrghhh~! _This wind is gonna' turn my wings into _wingsickles_ if we don't start flying!" Spyra shivered, shaking herself like a dog. Terradora growled some of the water being thrown around hit her. "So we're taking your lead, right, Terradora?"

"Indeed." The Earth Guardian nodded. "Solemn Pass was already unmissable. Now, you can just go to where all the bodies are."

"Spyra still has a lot of elemental training to undergo." The Fallen sat back and adjusted his armor. "Do you think you can teach her some things, Terradora?"

"_Pah._ Do I _think._" She chuffed. "We shall see if the legends speak the truth of a pruple dragon who can master _all_ elements. Earth is easy, like fire."

"_Hey,_ my students struggle as much as yours or the other Guardians'." Ignitia smiled, spreading her massive, umber wings with a creak of leather membranes.

"Aw yeah, time for some more ass-whoopin'." Spyra wiggled her rump and reared back to jump into the air. "We're keeping count of kills this time so I can prove I get more than you, Fallen."

"_Wait~!_"

The party turned when a fifth soul sprinted across the battlements towards them.

It was an Ice Dragon, a drake, with a cracked snout-horn and dressings cast over his chest underneath stringent plates of armor.

"I'm coming too! Lady Cyrila was my commanding officer, and Cynder got through me to take her. I have to help."

"_Colcrus._" Terradora grunted, mimicking the same sizing-up motions that she had done with Spyra and the Fallen during their first meeting. As usual, she looked no more impressed. Which meant she wasn't at all. "I respect your bravery, but few can engage Cynder once and walk away, think about your odds if you meet her a _second_ time."

"I have all of you supporting me, and I'm not staying here no matter what any of you say." Colcrus trotted closer, his icy eyes immediately darting between the Fallen and Spyra. He bowed a bit. "It's an honor to meet both of you. I'm Colcrus, I've taken unofficial command of the Ices here in Oversight in Lady Cyrila's stead. I humbly offer my services to the Purple Dragon of lege-"

"Yeahyeahyeah rhino-boy, you want in? Fantastic, lemme' wave my magic ass in the air and make you part of the gang. _Wa-zing~!_" Spyra twerked her hips. "_Boom! _Welcome to the club. Don't forget to grab a jacket and donate a few coins to our charitable douchebags jar. Any questions? No? A'ight. Get in formation, and just stay away from my kills."

Colcrus' mouth flapped a few times before the Fallen spoke to him too.

"Glad to have you on the team, guy." He gave a thumbs up.

"…I admit, that was quite commanding." Terradora muttered in Ignitia's ear-hole as the two Guardians trotted forwards.

"…u-uhm… right." Colcrus shook his head and jogged after them. "…right, so I guess I'm taking rearguard?"

"This guy talks a lot." Spyra quipped.

"Be thankful it isn't Corrinthol." The Fallen smirked. "I just might've punched some holes in his wings and watched him glide into a peak face-first for the hell of it."

Ignitia jumped when the most alien-sounding snicker crept out of Terradora's snout.

"_Terra'._" She gasped.

"W-What? It was nothing." The Earth Guardian blushed, stomping her foot. "Nothing I say. Mind your wingspace, Ignitia."

The dragons all took off after a brief run towards the merlons. Membranes creaked and the wind whistled as Terradora gave a summary flap, and jittered herself to the head of the arrow formation. The Fallen felt his breath stolen from him against the cold air and held on tight to Ignitia's neck.

"So the question is:" He called over the howling air. "where in these mountains would Cynder keep a Guardian?"

"There is only one location that Cynder's ego would lead her to here." Terradora replied over her wing. "What better place to humiliate and ultimately finish off Cyrila inside?"

"…Oh no." Ignitia breathed.

"You know I am right, Ignitia." Terradora blinked before returning her attention to the front of her flightpath. "Let it not daunt on you. We will still triumph."

"Ignitia?" The Fallen leaned closer.

"Crystal Tombs of Chrysalis." She told him. "There's nowhere else in these peaks Cynder could hold Cyrila. It's the largest Ice Dragon tomb in the Dragon Realms."

"Can somebody clue me in here?" Colcrus flapped, panicked, to keep up with them.

"_Shut up, new guy!_" Spyra barked. "You're crampin' our style!"

* * *

{🐉}


	35. Chapter 34 - Cold Hearts Lost

**Dragon(s)layer**

**34**

* * *

**Cold Hearts Lost**

* * *

_**{Mechassault OST - Tundra Ambiance}**_

* * *

When thunder started to roar through the gray overcast above, the Fallen began to worry himself over the possibility of more chilling rain before they even got to where they were going.

He was initially surprised when _snowflakes_ started to patter onto his face and chainmail.

_Oh, wait, that makes sense…_

Looking past Ignitia's crown, he examined their flightpath and the terrain below, flinching when she underwent a particularly forceful flap of her wings around him. Jagged foothills overgrown with manes of pine trees began to simmer out for large cliffside peninsulas and formations. The land dipped between two developing hunches of geography, starting as a grassy valley, but slowly transforming into fields of blanketed white.

Soon, the mountains' feet began to drag under the dragons' bellies. Then, those caps began to appear covered in snow just like the valley was.

The heavens yawned and released a light dusting falling all around them and through the misty air. The wind howled and the temperature dropped in a startling contrast to its earlier existence.

Spyra sneezed as snow began to clog up her snout, a brief whip of flame singing it away in a flash of amber light. She glanced over at the Fallen on Ignitia's back and gave him an expression somewhere between wonder and concern.

He hoped it was reassuring when he only gave a slight grin and a nod. He didn't know what else could have sufficed.

"Keep your eyes peeled." Ignitia called over the yowl of the cold. "We're coming up on Solemn Pass!"

"The cliffsides have navigable pathways we can use." Colcrus announced, not even blinking through the biting chill he was literally spearheading through. With his white and aqua scales, the snow almost rendered him invisible. "It's the only place we can land."

"Which _is_ inevitable." Terradora barked over her shoulder. "Look alive and follow me down. _Slowly._ I abhor casualties seen before contact with the enemy."

Up ahead, the mountains were strangled into a series of high-rising ridges that sidled up a narrow, sloping, and snow-drowned alley that slipped between the crags below. Recent signs of what at first the Fallen thought was an avalanche were everywhere. The base of the pass was sealed with a jagged crumbling of snowy debris. It was as if one of the mountains had had a gigantic piece cracked off of it that had closed up the valley.

But then, he started to see the bodies. At first, they were small and barely noticeable, appearing as black strips and dots in the plains and cliffsides. But as Terradora gestured with a paw and nose-dived for one of the mountainous pathways overlooking the pass, the proximity showed through the mist various corpses sprawled in the wintery dust.

Ignitia landed with a crunch into the snow, immediately shivering her tail off from the chilling sensation overtaking her feet.

"_Brrrggghh~!_" She trembled, coughing as she began fanning her wings and casting reams of white smoke everywhere. "I never liked winter…"

"Tell me about it." The Fallen brushed slush off his face as he dismounted.

"I couldn't imagine living without it, actually!" Colcrus jogged after his own landing behind her, looking around eagerly at the mountain they straddled. His expression dampened the moment he laid eyes on one of the dead dragons frozen in the snow. "-But this time it's too different to love. Ma'ams? I know this isn't the right time, but… these wyrms deserve better."

"When hostilities cease we can discuss the recovery of the dead." Terradora folded her wings after flapping them clear of buildup and trotted closer. "For now though, we must remain focused on the task at hand. We cannot continue to fly through this. We will be weighed down by the snow and crash against the rocks."

"No offense, guys, but that might be because _some of us_ are a little bigger than the rest." Spyra grinned as she galloped to a halt in the fluff by Terradora's flank. The purple dragoness laughed and plunged into a rise of snow with a minute crackle, her laughter muffling out around her exposed hips as she kicked and waved her tail madly.

"This cannot be the savior of our world." Terradora's eyes were as wide as roundel shields as she observed the purple dragon's antics.

"You can't really blame her." The Fallen chuckled, reaching up to snap off a tiny, developing icicle from the tip of Ignitia's horn.

"Oh! Because she's never-" Ignitia shifted and clicked her tongue in musing. "-Of course she hasn't. Then it is an expected reaction. If only we had more time."

"Yes…" Terradora gawked awkwardly at the display, flinching when Spyra burst out of the snow and rolled onto her back, making a snow-dragon with her wings. "…but we do not. And speaking of which: we're wasting it right now. I suggest we move."

"-_PFffffftttt~!_" Spyra ate a mouthful of snow and spat it out in a fine stream of vapor as her internal works flash-melted it. "…_killjoy.._." She muttered, slapping her chops.

"Terradora's right, unfortunately," The Fallen held a hand down and helped her out of the snow. "we can throw snowballs later."

"I can't see anything, not even to the other side of the pass." Colcrus called over. He had surmounted a boulder on the edge of the cliff and was squinting into the whipping blizzard-mist to try and get a glimpse at the other side of Solemn's aisle. Nothing, of course, met his eyes, as everything was shielded in the immense flesh of Father Winter. "We're going to have to go with our guts."

"I have reasons aplenty to no longer trust that method of thinking…" Ignitia sighed sadly, wiping her mouth as she brought her hacks under control. "Terra', you've been to the entrance caverns more recently than I have. Do you remember the way?"

"How could I not? I never forget places I spill blood over." Terradora grunted.

"What place? Nobody ever told me the intel' we may or may not have." Colcrus hopped down from the rocks and trotted closer. "Really, I came out here to find my commander, circumstance or not, but still…"

"Guardian Cyrila is being kept in the Crystal Tombs." Terradora grumbled, surveying the cliff path herself as snow whitened the creases of her chiseled snout. "There is not another place of interest out here otherwise. These mountains are a deathtrap."

"That's why the Ices built them here millennia ago: to keep out intruders." Ignitia shivered, wincing as she stood over a dead Wyvern, its dull flesh frozen solid from exposure, and its snarling face forever locked in a hideous death-snarl. "They never expected anything like Malefora's dark creations to go searching for it. Cynder knows that, and she knows that it's the first place we would look."

"If Cynder's occupying the tombs, that means she'll- she'll-" Colcrus gawked at them. "-She'll defile the cists!"

"We can only mend what we are able to." Terradora huffed. "No crime here will go unavenged. Let us move."

They took a route through the scattered corpses of Wyverns and dragons. There was only a small comfort in the fact that the dead numbered more of the prior than the latter by a huge margin. The snow came up to the Guardians' and Colcrus' knees and to Spyra's chest. The Fallen luckily was able to get away with hiking halfway up the ankle. Still, it was an effort to be made without his usual attire. At least the jumpsuit sleeve kept him from freezing mostly, his exposed hands even with the mail gloves started to go numb and a dull ache burned behind his eyes as his head froze up.

"This ain't so bad!" Spyra called, turning her face away from the wind. The party was climbing an incline in the pathway and the blizzard was funneling down it like it was a tunnel. "-I've dealt with worse back home!"

"Cockiness killed the gladiator." The Fallen grit his teeth, trying futilely to shield his face with an arm. "Evidently, it'll kill _me_ too. I can't feel my lips."

Ignitia trailed soot from her snout as her rotund breast began to glow a fervent amber from an internal flame broiling inside her body. Spyra saw what she was doing, and after a moment of huffing, she was able to duplicate the practice, the two Fires acting as organic lanterns in the dark glaze of the storm.

"A-Alright, m-maybe I t-t-take it back-" Spyra's fangs chattered.

"Think of a warm beach." The Fallen grunted.

"I don't know what the lot of you have to worry about, this weather is rather pleasant." Colcrus trotted through the whipping wind like it was nothing. He even dared to shoot the Fallen and Spyra a toothy smile before a snarl from the human silenced his efforts. "…So, uh… you're the warrior and the dragon everyone's talking about?"

"I don't suppose I can point the finger at anyone else." The Fallen nodded as he fought. "Your name's Colcrus, right?"

"Yes."

"Pleasure. _Real_ pleasure." He groaned in torment. "_Agh~! _Forget the lips, I'm gonna' lose a _ball_ out here."

"_Hey! _Don't go losin' none of those, I like those!" Spyra called over. "When everyone started talking about snow, I was thinking they meant like a bit of it or something, but this is fuckin' ridiculous!"

At that second, a wad of snowflakes smacked into her face and sent the squealing beastess tumbling in a blast of powder. The Fallen only stopped snickering when she chucked a ball of the stuff into his chest with a dull _thwack~!_

"You two seem pretty acquainted." Colcrus said. "How long did you travel to find Spyra, Fallen?"

"I didn't travel." He grumbled, brushing snow off himself and resuming his hike.

"So then how did you get to the realms?"

"I _fell._ Think about the name for second, friend."

"It's that literal?"

"Can you please tell your rabble to shut up?" Terradora growled over her shoulder at Ignitia, soldiering through the cold with a stern look. She still couldn't hide the slight shiver, even with her beefy musculature and huge wings shielding her flanks. "They're going to give us away."

"Technically, Colcrus is part of _your_ rabble." Ignitia chuckled, smoke slipping through her teeth from her internal furnace-ing. "No one is hearing us over all this howling anyway. And, Terra', I didn't get a chance to ask you back in Oversight, about my earlier concerns."

"Which ones." Terradora chuffed.

"Very funny."

"So easy it is to rile you up, sister." Terradora shot her an uncommon smirk. "See? I can do humor too. Now what was your query?"

"When are you coming home?" Ignitia hiked closer to put herself beside Terradora. "And I mean _home_ home, Terra', the place you once worked so hard to go."

"Desires shift with the flow of life." Terradora refused to make eye contact for the statement, even though she turned her snout to face her. "My presence is met when it is necessary, and no shortage of students educated in the element of Earth have been experienced. I hardly see the problem."

"We all fill in secondary roles as soldiers of the Dragon Realms, but we also have lives." Ignitia said. "And _friends._ You were the only one who would meditate with me during the afternoons, you know."

"Lies." Terradora chuckled. "Cyrila subsists on silence."

"True, but she subsists on _solitude_ just as well."

"Volteera gorges on the smallest ounce of interaction."

"I could never get her to sit still long enough for it." Ignitia shook her head with a grin. "Really, I express it for a reason, and it's because I miss it. I never wanted you so far away, and neither did Cyrila or Volteera. When we were hatchlings, we once said to one another- '_May duty seal us, but love bind us' –_I yearn for that again, and I think somewhere deep down you do as well."

"…I…" Terradora snapped her fangs and snorted. "…_maybe._ This isn't important right now."

"Hey, Big-Green-And-Terrible, mind if I shoot the shit for a sec'?" Spyra drew by Terradora's other side with a sharp quip. The Earth Guardian cringed.

"What did you even say to me just now?" She winced.

"If Ignitia's gonna' teach me how to master my Fire, how are you gonna' teach me to master my Earth?"

"It will not be a one-day process." Terradora assured, ignoring the amused grin flashed from Ignitia as she watched. "You will have to work, and work hard to attain even the slightest bearing of professionalism. And do not expect me to go easy on you for even the slightest imperfection. If you truly desire to become one with my Element, you must live _and_ breathe it."

"…Ugh…" Spyra crinkled her snout. "You sound even older than _Ignitia._"

"-I'm not old!" Ignitia burst. "I'm only thirty-six! _Thirty-six! _How is thirty-six old?!"

Suddenly, over the howl of the wind, a sharp cry rebounded through the peaks, and the covered-up thrum of wings beating etched out through the mist.

"What the hell was _that?_" Spyra gasped.

"Five-o-clock." The Fallen announced, slipping his gladius out and pointing at a spot in the air. "Dreadwing."

Snow and rocks crunched somewhere in the distance, followed by another shrill shriek. The thudding of heels in the dust foretold the large abomination skulking through the storm.

"They're landing." Colcrus said. "They mustn't be able to fly in this weather either!"

"Move faster." Terradora snapped.

* * *

**_{Epic Fantasy Music - Battle in the North}_**

* * *

A triangular and crag-tipped ridge ended the incline and emptied out into a large, caterpillar-shaped peninsula hugging the cliffside. The dragons and human hopped over the breakage and crunched quickly through the ankle-deep slush.

The wind buckled under the sharp arrival of a Dreadwing's freakish scream. A shadowy bulge materialized from inside the mist overlooking the perilous drop to the west. Snow burst everywhere when the Dreadwing landed in the center of the peninsula and skid to a halt in their path. The monster was hunched briefly as it rose from the wintery packing, its fur wavered in the blizzard wind caked in snow dust. The Ape rider on its back sneered behind a grilled helmet, his and his mount's breaths misting phantasmally in the whipping air currents.

The rider barked and pointed with a spear, urging the Dreadwing to scream again, and heavily gallop towards the party with its fanged mouth ajar and trailing spittle.

"_Take its flanks!_" Terradora cried. "Ignitia!"

"I've got it!" The Fire Guardian suppressed a fresh bought of hacks from her healing chest as she strode closer, and breathed a cone of cindering flame past Terradora's side and into the charging Dreadwing's face.

The bat monster shrieked and clambered face-first into the snow, nearly throwing its startled rider off his saddle.

Terradora spun around and brought her tail-mace down in a vicious swing. It hit the Dreadwing's skull and spattered its black and red contents into the snow with a repulsive crunch. The massive body spasmed and looked like it was melting into the snow as its exposed brains started to steam.

Colcrus vaulted over the Guardians and tackled the Ape rider out of his saddle and into the ground, tearing his throat open with his claws.

Another Dreadwing leapt from the west and crashed through the snow, followed by a second one. They shrieked and charged.

"_They're jumping over the gap!_" Ignitia shouted.

"Bastards landed on the wrong side." The Fallen frowned as he did his best to hurry through the slush. "At least they were expecting guests."

"I'd hate to surprise them!" Spyra groaned, bounding gazelle-like by his flank. "You're with me, sky-man."

The Dreadwing thundered the ground as it closed the distance, rearing up with its clawed wing-arms to bring them down on the two of them.

The Fallen threw himself and tucked right between the monster's legs as the blow landed and shot snow-dust everywhere. Spyra fanned her wings and leaped, bathing the Dreadwing's face in a blast of fire.

The Fallen climbed up the screaming monster's spined back, he bellowed, and decapitated the rider with a two-handed swing as he looped around the saddle throne.

He drove the gladius into the base of the Dreadwing's neck and twisted as Spyra zipped under its smoldering chin and sliced open its throat with one of her claws. The beast gurgled and collapsed with a thundering crash.

The air clapped as if thunder had burst in the very spot of the engagement when Terradora roared and stood on her hind legs. Her forepaws locked with the bestial spreads of the other Dreadwing's claws with a frightening clash of scale and leathery hide. Her arms trembled as the massive monster leant into her, opening its ugly mouth as a sonic scream pierced a wide cone over the Guardian's head.

Terradora grit her fangs as an unnaturally potent migraine stabbed into every part of her skull. She did not falter, however, and kept the Dreadwing on its feet, even taking a step forward as the Ape rider struggled to stay seated in his harness.

Ignitia galloped from the flank and shoulder-checked the Dreadwing, sending it tumbling with an enraged scream.

Colcrus opened his mouth, and a beeline of glowing white air shot from his throat and froze one of the Dreadwing's wing-joints solid in a glistening block of ice. Terradora brought her mace down and crushed the other wing's arm. Spyra followed through with a charging sprint and rammed the prone Dreadwing in the stomach horns-first, leaving a pair of blood-spewing holes.

The monster rolled to the edge of the peninsula before it and its rider slipped off the cliffside in a blast of dust, their howls echoing out briefly as they fell to their deaths.

"More of them." The Fallen shouted. "Infantry coming from the north."

"Spread out!" Terradora fanned a mighty wing against the chilling wind. "Do not let them surround us!"

A scattered mob of lumbering, hunch-backed shadows danced out of the mist down the path of the peninsula that they had been heading. Apes wreathed in animal furs with deer bone fetishes dangling from their arms and necks came sprinting from cover, howling, hooting and barking as they swung with axes and clubs.

The Fallen stepped back and winced as he wrung his fingers in a double-grip on his sword. The breaks may have been mended by the magic back in Oversight, but hell, his hand still burned. Hopefully _this_ time he could prevent himself from smashing the thing.

_One can only hope…_

The first Ape waded through the snow in a long turn and leaped with a meat-cleaver raised over its head. The Fallen parried the blow with a feral snarl, and swept under the Ape's arm, bisecting him from hip to breast in an uphanded drag. He elbowed the convulsing body from his path and stuck out his wrist, grunting as an Ape punched his own forehead through right on the blade up until the hilt. The Fallen twisted and ripped free, tearing away the whole upper portion of the Ape's face in a spurt of gore.

Bolts of lightning scythed down a trio of foes at his flank. Spyra leapt into the fray and started using her claws, slashing open bellies and throats before swatting the soon-corpses away with her tail or wings.

Another Dreadwing jumped the gap and landed behind them. Terradora made the beast swallow its brain when she pushed its head into its own shoulders from a heavy swing of her mace. Ignitia vaporized a squad of Ape soldiers with a precise jet of flames, and Colcrus froze an officer solid before throwing him off the cliff's face.

Blood stained the snow, and the rattle of the melee echoed throughout the mountains, blending with the animalistic cries of the Apes and the roar of angry dragons.

This racket was only beaten by the hideous shriek of the largest Dreadwing any of them had ever seen.

The Fallen ran his blade through an officer's groin before shattering his teeth with the hilt of his gladius. He surmounted the corpse as soon as it crashed down into the snow, and then the massive Dreadwing landed right in front of him, making him stagger back from all the debris thrown about. It was armored, even possessing a helmet carved crudely from snarling iron that left its glowing eyes exposed via a pair of daggered slits.

"_Well well well_, it looks like dere be one of me new favorite best friends." Chieftain Jute called over the rush of the storm from Charlee's back. "_Hoo-man._ I gots a score ta settle with you and that purple drag."

"I thought he was dead!" Spyra cried right as her latest victims collapsed all around her as blackened husks.

"Get in line, shitbreath." The Fallen took a hand off his sword and flipped the Chieftain off with his middle finger. "I'll bend your mother over your corpse and fuck her with your axe."

Jute whipped Charlee's reins, and the large monster shrieked, striking out with one of its claws.

They shredded the cuirass protecting the human's torso and sent him rolling raggedly through the snow. He twisted and skidded on his heels to rise again. Charlee shrieked and covered the distance with a heavy, thundering leap. The Dreadwing slashed again, but the Fallen tucked under the blow and ran his sword to the handle through Charlee's breast.

Black blood misted from the connection as Charlee howled and tore back, ripping the gladius free with a blast of black, stringy gore.

"_Dah! _Charlee! Don't take dat from some sharr-la-tahn twig-person like him! _Kill him! _Da Mistress will jus have ta deal wit his corpse!" Jute barked. "We can split da meat aftehward!"

Charlee shrieked as he missed again and the Fallen slashed him across the mouth, the blow nearly dislodging the Dreadwing's bulky helmet.

"Gotta do anythin worth doin meself." Jute leaped off the throne mounting and landed with a mighty crash in the snow, dragging out a large, two-handed battleaxe. "Talk bout me mum again to me face."

Right as the Fallen finished ripping his sword free of Charlee's flank, he vault-kicked the Dreadwing in the chin and sent the massive beast back a step. He didn't get a chance to rise before Jute's axe drove for his head.

The Fallen rolled and dodged the downwards slash. He attempted to parry a summary strike, but Jute laughed as their blades met in a flash of sparks, and the Fallen was tossed onto his ass with a pained cry. It felt like his arm had almost been torn out of its socket, and it was a miracle the gladius hadn't been ripped from his fingers.

"Some weakling little fing like you ain't got that kinda punch." Jute snarled, nimbly avoiding a slash for his leg. He raised his axe. "This is fer _Sparkles_, yu murderer."

"You named one of these things _Sparkles?_" The Fallen gawked.

Just then, a bolt of lightning sent Jute flipping away with an arm of soot marking his flightpath. Charlee shrieked when another struck his helmet in a flash of sparks.

Spyra landed by the Fallen's side and nudged him back up to his feet.

"How many times I gotta' bail your ass out, boi'?" She smirked.

The Fallen wrapped an arm under her gut and threw the two of them back right as an Ape Commander thundered over and brought his greatsword down where they had been standing.

"Call it a joint effort." He winked as they recovered.

Nearby, Terradora released a thundering cry as she completed a loop on her heels, her mace crunching away a quad of limp Ape corpses.

"Ignitia!" She shouted. The Fire Guardian incinerated two foes, bit down on a third and spat him over the cliff's edge before listening. "It's Chieftain Jute!"

"_What?!_" Ignitia shrieked. "He's alive? He must be leading the ambush!"

"He is certainly a part of it, if you both must know!"

Snow burst as a black blur slammed into the peninsula between them.

Rising from the mist, Cynder released a horrifying scream as crimson Fear energies knocked Terradora off her paws, throwing the Guardian onto the ground with a great crash.

"Come for that ice-hag Cyrila, have you? Over my corpse, Ignitia." Cynder swung around and caught the roaring Fire Guardian's paws when she leapt. The two dragons snarled as they locked talons and yanked one another about. "_You really are- gah-! –a thorn in my side._" She snarled through grit fangs.

"_A-As childish as it might sound-_" The Guardian shivered as she slowly forced Cynder down. "-_you started it._"

Ignitia drenched Cynder's sleek body in flames, ripped free of the lock and slammed her across the face with the girth of her tail in a vicious swing of her whole body.

Cynder's head was thrown into the ground and she skidded, eating the snow. The black dragoness dug her tailblade in and used it to vault from the impact. She landed by Ignitia's flank and spat a glowing green projectile of Poison.

The Guardian cried out as the magical attack hit her flank and exploded in a green mist of singing miasma. She worked through the stinging agony and was able to dodge a flurry of swipes from infuriated black dragon's claws.

Terradora came back with her mace, but Cynder slithered under the assault like a dark snake, vanishing into the very ground with a black burst of Shadow energies.

She reappeared on Terradora's opposite side, eliciting a pained roar from the Guardian as she opened her long beak, and bit down across her scaly neck.

Cynder pumped her wings, and with a heave brought her and her foe into the air. She leaned Terradora into her chest and proceeded to doggy-paddle with her hind paws, raking the Guardian's hips with bloody slashes over and over, and shredding the armor there.

Colcrus bounded over, jumped and bit down on Cynder's tail, dragging down the screeching Cloud Ripper before crashing her into the snow.

"Why wontchyu jus die?!" Jute hollered on the other side of the field, swinging with abandon.

The Fallen danced past his hip and Spyra vaulted over his shoulder. A bolt of lightning frying over his back and a jagged slash of steel over his waist sent the Chieftain reeling. He landed in the snow with a pained yip, quivering as he tried to rise, breathless and bleeding.

"_Charlee~!_" He cried.

The massive Dreadwing bowled the Fallen and Spyra over as it stampeded between them, scooping up its master and tossing him onto the saddle above.

Spyra pumped the monster's legs full of Electric bolts but the Dreadwing was still able to spread its wings and leap into the misty air, disappearing into the storm's howl.

"Damn it!" Spyra barked, frying an overeager Ape soldier instead. "He ran away!"

"I don't think so." The Fallen breathed as he killed more of the simian barbarians hoping to take advantage of their master's efforts to weaken him. An Ape screamed horrifically as he hooked a jugular, and yanked the gladius free with a splatter of blood. "They've all come too far to give up that easy."

"Indeed, that's a truth if dere evva was one." A deep, new and guttural voice said. "I herd from some of me fellows that you gutted Visigoth. He was a cock, but also a friend uv mine."

The Fallen grunted as a bolt of white, luminescent power struck him in the chest and laid him out in the snow. It was indescribably cold and stung his flesh through the sleeve and his chainmail.

A huge Ape covered in furs and wearing a horned Viking-styled battle-helm stomped out of the swirling blizzard-mist, wielding a wooden totem-staff carved to resemble a monkey's screaming maw. A ragged white cloak flapped ardently over his broad shoulders, and in his other paw he brandished a large hatchet that was still stained with drying blood.

"_Vandal! _Gimme a hand wit these two, aye?" Charlee and Jute crashed in a landing on the other side of the Fallen and Spyra, penning the heroes in between two very displeased Chieftains. "Ya said ya wanted a good hunt. The Mistress was kind enuff to bring us it!"

"That I dih." Vandal grumbled, his sunken eyes darting between the human and dragoness over his fanged, piggish snout. "Never tasted hoo-man or purple drag meat beforr. Furst fer everythin I'm supposin."

"We'll share the cauldron." Jute cackled. "I get the hoo-man's legs."

"This armor is very deceiving, sir: there isn't much off the bone on me I'm afraid." The Fallen shrugged as he shakily stood. "Call me guilty of false advertising."

"Jeez', he's big… Do we have a plan?" Spyra raised a brow at him, hunching and preparing for the fight as she darted her gaze between the two imposing Apes. "Or is this just a _wing-it_ sorta' deal?"

The Fallen paused, glancing at each Chieftain in turn. He coughed and looked down at her.

"Wing-it."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Epic Fantasy Music - Battle in the North}_**

* * *

Cynder snarled when a pair of teeth clenched painfully over her ankle, and another set clamped down across her wrist.

Colcrus drew, and Ignitia quartered as the two dragons yanked in their efforts to tear her apart. The Cloud Ripper shrieked, and then twisted, sending them both off with quick lashes of her tail. A magical barrier prostrated itself around her the second she landed, flaring crimson when a trio of stalagmites shot through the air and burst against her defenses. Terradora roared and thundered through the snow towards her.

Cynder screeched as the large Guardian tackled her, landing them both in a blast of smog and crumbling rocks.

Maybe once before in Oversight, Terradora had been keen on beating answers out of her in some measure of restraint. Now though, that she was aware of her sister's whereabouts, she couldn't have been bothered with any incentive to hold back.

Pain bloomed in Cynder's head as Terradora battered her skull into the ground with a series of heavy punches and slams. Her world rushed and she felt dizzy as the barrage laid her flat. One punch elicited a cringe-worthy _crack~! _–as the tip of her upper right horn broke off with a dusting cloud of cartilage.

The Cloud Ripper's prehensile tailblade sliced across Terradora's ribs and opened them to a gushing river of dark dragonblood. Her tail ensnared the Earth Guardian's throat and cut her roar of pain short into a sharp gag.

"_Get off of me._" Cynder snarled, throwing Terradora away with an enraged whip's crack.

Terradora spat into the snow and shook her head about to try and get her bearings as she staggered back. Cynder shrieked like an eager hawk and threw herself forwards. She shot the Guardian in the face with a spat bolt of green Poison, slashed open her cuirass with her claw, and rose to her hind-legs to deliver a crushing uppercut with her fist into Terradora's chin.

**_Crnchhh~! _**–the connection sounded like a gunshot, and it saw Terradora flip head-over-heels twice before she impacted the side of the cliff and landed at the base in a painfully loud rockslide of dislodged stones, smoke and snow.

"Nobody _touches_ me, you uncultivated harridan." Cynder reached into her beak and snapped off a loose tooth. She flicked it away and spun around. "You all realize you're fighting for a dragon you'll soon find unrecognizable."

"What have you done with her?!" Ignitia sprinted over and slashed for Cynder's head with her talons, each missing blow whistling in the cold air. "What have you done to Cyrila?"

Cynder caught Ignitia's wrist and cracked her in the sternum with a quick punch. She snickered as the breathless Guardian flapped her wings to displace herself, ragged coughs and hacks wresting her fight from her.

"I'm turning all of that horridly wasted Mana of hers into something of great use." Cynder glanced over at Colcrus as the angry Ice Dragon flanked her. "I wouldn't expect any of you to understand. But that does not excuse you from my wrath in the least."

She roared when Colcrus slipped around a Poison bolt from her and shot Cynder's shoulder with a clump of spat Ice.

The blade of cold shattered like glass and speckled Cynder's flesh with bloody gashes from the shrapnel. She snarled through the pain and used her tail to bat away a claw-strike aimed for her hip. The Cloud Ripper thundered the ground as she hopped out of the engagement, and her wing smacked Colcrus in the snout, causing him to swing completely around and crash.

_Weaklings,_ Cynder's crimson chest pumped as the adrenaline settled in her veins. She heard the blast that was unmistakeably the sound of an ice-based spell being cast, and shot her gaze across the peninsular field.

_Vandal._

He was right on time, as was Jute. Their eagerness was no doubt influenced by all the destruction wrought upon their tribes by the intended victims.

But that still didn't absolve them from her whims.

She wanted the Fallen alive.

Cynder- through all the wear and tear of the battle-strain –watched him fight with a sudden flutter in her chest. The human grunted and snarled, creamy skin flexing underneath his jumpsuit and the chainmail he'd gotten no doubt from Mole artificers as he battled for his life.

Chieftain Vandal bellowed a magical cant and struck out with his quarterstaff, the monkey's mouth tipping it flashing white as a bolt of cold energy whipped across the snow. The Fallen tucked and rolled, barely avoiding the blow as he landed in the slush heavily.

The Fallen slowly pulled himself out of the snow, spitting a mouthful of it from his lips with an angry sneer. For just a second, his eyes met hers and Cynder saw that same recognition of her own in his face. He muttered something she couldn't hear, and then threw himself backward as Vandal stampeded over and brought his booted paw down to try and stomp on his head.

"-_No-!_" Cynder choked off her cry and forced it down her throat.

She couldn't allow what happened with Zargos to occur again.

The moment the Apes thought she was in any way colluding with the enemy, they would turn on her. She would have to deal with whatever injuries the Fallen sustained once he was beaten, if she ultimately wanted what she desired.

_Which is him._

It certainly didn't feel like winter in her nethers right now. Cynder shuddered and galloped through the heavy snow to join the new fight. She was able to force away her bubbling emotions by laying eyes on the Fallen's battle-partner.

Cynder snarled as Spyra danced back and forth with Chieftain Jute and his terrible Dreadwing mount. The beast tore rents through the snow every time it brought a wing or foot down to try and squash the zipping dragoness, and Jute howled in rage every time he swung with his mighty axe and ultimately missed. Spyra was too quick and too slippery. Cynder would never admit that it reminded her of herself.

_She _did_ come from the same clutch of eggs…_

The Cloud Ripper shrieked and banished these thoughts, giving her wings a flap to gain height.

There was nothing alike between them. And Cynder _hated_ that. She hated Spyra. She hated _all of them._

Spyra vaulted off Jute's face and sent the Chieftain staggering. She knocked him off his feet with a blast of lightning, and jarred over to meet Charlee. The Dreadwing shrieked and hit her in the chest with his great wing. The blow sent Spyra skidding- still on her paws –through the snow. She and Cynder practically magnetized to one another.

Cynder grappled the smaller hen's wings in her paws and chucked her across the ground, skipping Spyra like she was a polished stone across the surface of an immeasurably white pond.

Spyra leaped to her feet and Cynder drove the attack. She stole the purple dragon's breath with a blow across the snout and caused her to spit ribbons of blood with a mule-kick to the chest.

"_You~!_" Cynder screamed. "_You die today, purple-worm!_"

"I was wonderin' where you'd sauntered off to," Spyra dodged under her tail, and jolted every inch of Cynder's body as she drove a lightning bolt into her ribs with a staticy _clap! _"-ya' antisocialite, lip-piercing slut!"

Cynder grunted when Spyra threw herself into her breast. The Cloud Ripper sent snow everywhere as she slammed onto her back, and Spyra straddled her.

"Y'know, the other day," Spyra punched her across the face. "-I smelled you're skanky-ass on _my_ male!" She batted away Cynder's paws with her wings and decked her in the nose. "And I gotta' say," A blow right below the jaw. Cynder's head was batted around like a punching-bag mounted to a ceiling. "-_ya' just made it real personal-like!_"

Cynder snatched a fist tightly over Spyra's throat, nearly squeezing her eyes out of their sockets.

"-_ULP-!_"

"The human's _mine._" Cynder frothed at the mouth. "_Mine mine mine mine! You fucking, stupid bitch! **Mine.**_"

Spyra ate the cliff-wall in a blast of rubble. She coughed on her own spit and rock-dust, rolling to the side as Cynder's heel cracked the very earth where she had been lying.

"You think I'm going to let a little village-bumpkin like you steal my king?" Cynder slashed left and right, up and down, and Spyra zipped around all of her blows perfectly. "You've already taken so much from me. My pride, my confidence, my power, my conjugal privilege-!"

Spyra raked her claw across her beak, and a burst of flame reared Cynder up onto her hinds.

"The next thing I'm takin' is your _life._" Spyra darkly gloated. "No more Mrs. Nice Dragon: I'm gonna' murder you."

Spyra opened her jaws wide and dove for Cynder's exposed neck.

The Cloud Ripper's eyes had a second to widen.

She was exposed.

The jugular.

-A bolt of ice-magic swatted Spyra out of the air and sent the mighty Purple Dragon into the cliff's wall with a blast of white smog.

Cynder righted her quadruped stance and whipped her head over to see Chieftain Vandal lowering his quarterstaff and giving her a brief nod as he turned to face the Fallen.

The human was locked in a slashing match with Jute and his Dreadwing. Rings of mail scattered from his chest like a bushel of thrown coins when Jute got a good blow in on his torso with his axe. The Fallen cast the frontal skirt of his cuirass off in one fluid motion and threw it in the Chieftain's face. He tucked and opened Jute's thigh with a downwards slash, and then impaled his foot right into the ground, pinning him.

Jute howled in agony and started to teeter over. The Fallen abandoned his gladius, stepped back and caught the Chieftain's head in his hands, before bringing him down into his knee with a sharp crack. The Ape's massive body tumbled backwards in a cloud of snow-dust.

Charlee screeched and pinned the Fallen under a massive wing-claw, opening its jaws to bite down as Vandal stormed closer with his staff raised, another cant bellowing out of his mouth.

"_No~!_" Cynder screamed, making to run after him. "-_Don't kill hi-_"

**_CSSSHHKK~!_**

Cynder yelped and fell on her face.

She breached her head out of the snow with a gasp and shook it about to cast away the slush. The dragoness' foot was caught on something!

When she turned over to glare angrily at the disturbance, Cynder saw what it was and immediately daggered her brow in confusion.

It was a wad of _ice._

It was incasing her rear-paw and affixing it to the ground.

Her first thought was…

"…_Cyrila…? H-How-?"_

From the blizzard's mist sprinted Spyra. She opened her mouth, and when Cynder expected flames, instead, a washing cone of unbelievably cold Mana burst in a concentrated stream.

_Ice Element._

Que the stereotypical exclamation:

_That should be impossible!_

God damned Purple Dragon.

Cynder cried out as her tail up to the mid-point was frozen in a growing chunk of solid, crystal-clear ice as Spyra's breath washed over her scales. It heavily clomped into the snow, and when she tried to raise it, it felt like an anvil was pinning her.

Spyra leaped past and slammed her across the face with a quick punch. When Cynder reeled, she yanked her legs and shattered the ice pinning her foot.

_Bingo._

Cynder shrieked and opened her own maw as she gathered Fear Mana in her chest.

Spyra's breath whooshed out like a gust of mountain wind, and for a moment, Cynder didn't realize that all the whiteness covering her eyes wasn't just from the actual snowstorm going on around them.

Ice crackled, her face felt like she had dipped her head in freezing cold water, and she went deaf.

Spyra had frozen her head.

Cynder's muffled cry etched out as the chunk of crystal containing her skull hit the ground with a stone-like _thwock~! _–and pinned her there. The black dragoness spread her limbs and fought with the block on her tail and the new one over her head, whipping, yanking and muffling out screams as she fought desperately.

Spyra cackled at the display and held up her paw, breathing sensually onto her scales, she watched in wonder as a tiny ice-gem developed in her palm. She flipped it like a coin and watched it land in the snow before mysteriously melting.

"Guess I don't have to be _hot_ to solve everything."

She galloped to Cynder's rear, stood on her hinds and literally kicked her in the ass. The black dragon muffled a shriek and collapsed in a disorganized heap in the snow, wriggling as she fought with her frozen bodyparts in agony.

"Nice chatting with ya'. I'd love to stay longer." Spyra spat on Cynder and sprinted towards the battle. "But I got things to do."

"Visigoth ad his moments he did, when I struggled an all ta see him fer da brother he really was to meh." Vandal grumbled with his foily voice, ripping off the Fallen's leather pauldron with a glancing slash of his hatchet. "But none that evva made it acceptable ta see his end. I'll avenge his ole tribe when I gut yu."

A blast from his quarterstaff knocked one of the Fallen's legs out from under himself. He stumbled, and Jute cackled as he leaped into his pathway, and crashed the butt of his axe across the human's head.

The Fallen bellowed and tumbled into the snow.

Vandal thundered over and brought down his cleaver for his neck.

The Fallen intercepted with a kick to his wrist, and the cleaver whistled as it flipped free of the Chieftain's grubby fingers, landing with its handle in the air in the snow.

Vandal roared in rage, but his response was thwarted when a block of ice cracked into existence and froze the hand carrying his staff solid.

The Chieftain had a second to blink at the peculiar sight before the Fallen jumped to his feet and ran for the cleaver.

Jute couldn't catch him as Spyra bounded over and sent him sprawling with a blast of cold that impacted his flank with the sound of shattering glass. He yelped and landed face-first in the slush.

Vandal howled and tried to use his frozen limb as a blunt object, swinging it at Spyra and missing as she rolled like liquid under the strike. She slashed his belly armor and the furs there to ribbons and knocked him back with a headbutt to the chest.

The Fallen appeared by Spyra's flank, Vandal's cleaver in both hands as he hollered and raised it over himself. Vandal gawked before the blade sank to the hilt directly above and between his eyes with a wet crack. His horned helmet kicked sparks and tumbled down his back with a few metallic clacks. The Chieftain thudded loudly onto his mighty knees, his arms draping weakly by his sides.

The Fallen sneered and twisted the bisecting blade before ripping out through the side. Vandal's head gushed gore despite outwardly appearing in fine clarity. Then, it loosely slid apart in two separately eyed halves to allow gray-colored brain matter and even the Ape's now exposed tongue to dribble down his neck and chest.

Vandal collapsed into the snow and lye there as a large bundle of dead, furry meat. His brains spilled for over two feet ahead of him, staining the slush a grotesque hue somewhere between pink and red.

The wail that belted out of Jute's throat was indescribable.

It would've gone on longer had his witty mount, Charlee, not thundered over and plucked the large Chieftain by the scruff in his fangs. The Dreadwing extended its bat-wings and leaped across the cliff gap with a rush of blizzard-ridden air. It landed somewhere on the opposite pathway and could be heard galloping away.

"…_Agh…_" Spyra growled, nursing a bloody snout. "-he definitely ran away _that_ time."

"Yeah," The Fallen wheezed, collapsing to his knees and dropping the cleaver as he doubled over and gagged. "-he did."

Nearby, Terradora was growling as she clawed her way out of the rubble and snow. Ignitia shook herself like a dog and rose from the nearby drift mound. Colcrus was washing off the side of his snout with snow to get rid of some drying blood.

Glass shattered as Cynder swung her craning neck over, and slammed her head into the cliff. The ice-chunk broke into a million pieces, exposing the panting dragoness as she sucked in rapid breaths. She repeated this motion with her tail and leaned against the rocks for support.

Terradora growled like a displeased dog as she and Ignitia stalked closer from one direction, Colcrus from the next, and Spyra from the other side. The dragons penned her in like she was defenseless, wild game, and for a moment, Cynder actually felt the comparison.

Heaving, she glanced over their wings at the Fallen as he shakily stood himself up among all the Ape corpses, his gaze fixed upon her as he stumbled closer.

Cynder bowed her head to him, her jaw quivering as the realization of her failure set in.

"-_C-Cynder…_" The Fallen coughed, startling Spyra as he gripped her wing for support. He reached out to the black dragoness with an open hand. "-_Wait-_"

Cynder vanished into the ground in a burst of black, tarry Shadow smog. The snow whipped in plumes of white and then settled.

The Terror of the Skies was gone.

"_Tah._" Spyra clicked her tongue, shaking her head at the display as she helped stand the Fallen up. "_Pathetic_."

"_-I-Is everyone *cough* a-alright?" _Ignitia coughed and sputtered, surveying the four of them.

"Aye, Lady Ignitia." Colcrus grunted, wincing as pain shot up from the fresh bruises developing under his scales.

Terradora made a grunting noise and glanced at all the dead Apes now slowly being buried by the falling torrents of snow. She spat a bloody wad away and started trotting, ignoring the lacerations even as they bled.

"Keep moving." She snarled to them all.

"You good, dude?" Spyra had to breathe with her mouth open as she exhaustively gazed at her mate.

"I'm good." The Fallen put a reassuring hand on her flank as he forced himself to stand up. "I'll be better when we start walking."

"The guys weren't, uhm…" Colcrus gave a tired grin. "-weren't _lying_, when they said you two were like supersoldiers… maybe when this is done and over with, I can get an autograph."

* * *

{🐉}

The damage wasn't bad enough to cripple any of them. What limited healing spells Ignitia could muster sufficed for the majority of the contusions, and luckily Colcrus had been proactive enough to keep a small healing potion from Oversight on his hipsash right by his canteen. Really, a more driving concern was _thirst. _The Fallen held Ignitia's own canteen to Spyra's chest after filling it snow and drank the whole thing when it finished melting, and they repeated the action for the purple dragoness herself.

Terradora initially refused help, and only after Ignitia soothed her with a long moment of talk did the Earth Guardian finally relent and take a swig of Colcrus' potion. She let no one else but Ignitia touch her, however, and so many of her cuts continued to weep thin trails of blood as they got back on track.

Nobody spoke as they braved the harsh blizzard again and trudged up the mountain path through ankle-deep snow.

"_Spyra…?_" The Fallen weakly muttered, looking at her by his side. "A-Aren't you cold?"

"…Uh… not… really, actually?" Spyra blinked at him awkwardly, not understanding the answer herself. She puckered her chops and blew a thin waft of icy breath in front of herself, watching it dissipate into the rest of the blizzard. "I-I think now that I have the Ice Element I-…. Ever since I got it, the cold just isn't bothering me, anymore…"

"Traits of being one with the Ices." Colcrus marveled. "Ancestors, you really _are_ something different from the rest of us."

"She still has to master it." Terradora sourly snapped, her judging gaze resting on Spyra for a brief while.

"All she's missing is _your_ element now, Terra'." Ignitia smiled, leaning down to nuzzle Spyra's snout with her own. It was more surprising when the purple beastess tiredly reciprocated. When Ignitia rose again, the smile was gone, but not because it had died with sadness. There was… something else in her eyes. "Spyra, I'm so proud of you."

"Me too." The Fallen smirked down at her. Spyra jumped in front of him and stood up, her forepaws on his chest as she leaned in and locked their mouths in a long, stilling kiss.

Spyra smacked free, panting as she touched her forehead with his. The wind seemed to howl with a bit more quietness, expended snowflakes rolling off of their shoulders and her wings.

"That was another close one." She mumbled to him.

"I know." He frowned, almost falling asleep as he leaned into her.

"That's the second Chieftain I've seen you kill."

"I know."

She licked his lips.

"Don't die."

The other dragons stared as she plopped back into the snow and fell into step beside him again. Colcrus appeared shocked, soon to be catching flies with how low his jaw was hanging. Ignitia looked jealous, and was literally fuming embers out of her nose as she tried to find something else to focus on over the edge of the misty cliff.

Terradora's initial expression of disgust noticeably wavered, and turned into something maybe even beyond confusion.

_Intrigue,_ perhaps? Whatever it was, she'd sooner have died than she would've acknowledged it with any of them, even Ignitia.

Another hour of walking, and the storm began to settle. The whiteout cleared and the driving snowfall became nothing but petty, carpeting flurries. It revealed the true majesty of the Solemn Pass in its entirety.

The mountains were hundreds of stories tall on either side of the narrow trench, and the drop to the snowy valley below was steep and massive, making the Fallen dizzy whenever he glanced at it only because he was the sole party-member without wings.

He'd never have flinched if he had his jet-thrusters.

But those had been taken from him, along with the rest of his gear.

The defeat he'd suffered was still a sore background pain in his mind. He had plenty of time to brood on it, but everything that had gone on had prevented those times from lasting long.

-That, and despite the fact he was already fucking exhausted, all the snow and cold mountains reminded him of the Furies.

Toothless loved snow too…

"Jesus, you really are a man-whore!" Conscience said by his side, startling the Fallen as his second-half gestured to Spyra. "What's she, like, number bajillion-and-one?"

"_God, shut up._" The Fallen grumbled.

"Did you say something?" Spyra glanced at him.

"No." He shook his head, staring at her purple hips as they rolled with each step.

* * *

**_{Neighsayer - I'm Proud of You}_**

* * *

An abandoned and crumbling watchtower was scabbed into the pass' side around a tumbling foundation of stone. It protruded from the snow like an unnaturally sculpted, artificial ulcer made out of the mountain's own flesh. The top had caved in, and a single, weak banner-mast occasionally tugged as the wind whipped a torn, blue-colored flag that gave off cloth-sounding smacks everytime it was pulled taught. The murder-slots rounding its top were dark and lonely, the whole sight exuding the feeling of abandonment.

"We aren't far at least." Ignitia said. "We could fly through this, make the rest of the way quicker."

"Soon, the air will be too thin." Terradora shook her head. "We are already dangerously above normal altitude. We also do not know when and if the storms will harry us again."

"I don't mind the walking," Spyra said. "I'm beat anyhow. My wings feel like they're made of lead."

"What does the outside of Chrysalis look like?" The Fallen stared at a nearby ridge when rocks crumbled quietly down it.

"It's probably tricked out with gems and royal-looking architecture and shit." Spyra followed his gaze. "I think it'll be awfully hard to miss, if ya' ask me."

Terradora gave a scoffing rumble and grinned at the purple dragoness.

"If only the Ices took after such a view." She chuckled.

"There is power in modesty." Ignitia stated. "Those tombs were erected to be free of the molestations of politics and petty desires. I think too that it's the least that could've been done for those wyrms. Life in that age was hard."

"I've only heard stories about the tombs, but every Ice knows about them." Colcrus added. "I know some others in my unit that wanted to make a pilgrimage there if the war ever ended. I guess I'll have to do it for them while it's still going."

"You never wished to witness it for yourself?" Ignitia glanced back at him.

"Fleetingly." Colcrus' gaze was glassy, and he didn't focus on any of them as he fixated on something over the cliff-side.

"We have arrived." Terradora huffed, gesturing with her tail to a sprawl in the mountains just ahead. "And damnation, if it isn't on the other side."

"We can manage brief flights." Ignitia reassured. "But we have to make it quick."

Seated atop a great scar left in the aftermath of an ancient landslide, or perhaps the migration of a glacier, was a rough-hewn gash that went deep inside the flesh of the mountain. It was arched by cleanly carved stone, and the top of the arachnid and squat structure was capped with a massive, silver-trimmed blue gem that glowed even without the sun bearing down on it.

A pair of braziers rose out of the gravel-coated ground of the entryway burning with blue flames, and a long, winding and treacherous pathway leading up the tunnel's foot was lined with small, stone archways whose support struts were chiseled centimeter by centimeter in unreadable draconic script. The calligraphy was shockingly astute, and it was almost painful to witness such masterpieces slowly being eaten away by time and winter.

"…Eh," Spyra raised a brow and cocked her head. "I was _half_ right. Still kinda' looks a bit like a dump."

Colcrus gave an insulted glare and Ignitia giggled, like she was watching the naïve actions of a toddler.

"Hey," He intoned delicately. "that's my people's ancestral burial grounds you're talking about."

"Well then maybe those stone-workers or whoever the hell they had up here shoulda' put more effort into the architecture." Spyra creased her chops. "What is it with ancient civilizations and sucking at housekeeping? My room-nook back home was tidier than this."

The winding pathway up to the arch terminated at the very chin of the trench dividing their side from its. There were cracked pillars on both sides of the pass that might've once shown the beginnings of a long collapsed bridge linking across the gap.

"Uh… wasn't the bridge still here when you last journeyed to the tombs?" Ignitia stepped to the edge and gazed over the cliff balefully.

Terradora sighed through her nose and gave a small, annoyed: "_Mmhmm._" –before trotting towards the two crumbling pillar-markers on their side of the gap.

"I will cross the distance first and make sure the area is secure. Colcrus will come next. Then Ignitia and Spyra." She listed. "You will have to decide among yourselves who shall carry the burden of the _parasite._ Because I will certainly not."

"Well, that wasn't very nice." The Fallen blinked.

Terradora spread her massive, creaking wings, and leaped over the side, giving them a good flap as she glided over the perilous drop passing beneath her belly.

Even though they weren't in the air with her, the rest of them could detect that something was a bit amiss. Terradora's efforts were more strained than they would have been normally in flight. She seemed to be heavier and her wings had a harder time catching the wind.

Eventually, though, the Earth Guardian touched down at the base of the sprawling pathway with a crumble of gravel. Now distant, Terradora folded her wings and glanced her snout around the little clearing before walking towards the first arch, not even looking back at the rest of the party.

"Holy fuck, she's really an uppity bitch. Is she like on the rag or something?"

"_Spyra!_" Ignitia gasped. "Please do not speak of Terradora in such a way! She's worked hard to keep the realms safe."

"Colcrus?" The Fallen glanced at the Ice Drake.

"See you guys on the other side." Colcrus took a running leap off the cliff-face and experienced the same difficulties as he jaggedly soared. When he reached the other end, they could his chest pumping as he panted. He scrabbled onto the clearing, sitting down like an exhausted cat.

"Thin air?" Spyra looked at Ignitia.

"Thin enough to impact flight." The Guardian glanced up at the cloudy gray sky. "A little higher and it would make breathing more difficult. It makes the wind thinner: harder for the wings to catch onto it so we can use momentum."

"Remember those islands?" The Fallen patted her on the shoulder. "What were the words you used? _It's fun,_ right?"

"…Pah. …_Off you go, flippin' my own shit back on me, and fuckin'_…" Spyra grumbled a tirade as she trudged to the edge herself. "Cynder ambushed us there too."

"A past encounter down south, I'm assuming?" Ignitia sidled up beside the Fallen.

"Yep." He grunted. "_Spyra,_ be careful alright? You'll do fine."

"Thanks for the reassurance _mom._" Spyra spread her wings out, gulping when she took a look at the drop.

The snowy valley of Solemn looked like a large, mini-model of the geography from where she stood. Tiny finger-sized trees speckled around clusters of sharp, black rocks that pointed up at her in threatening arrays.

The purple dragoness closed her eyes and grunted, shaking her head to clear it of all the nervousness and hesitation, and all the other shit…

She jumped and pumped her wings.

-And immediately starting falling.

Spyra heard Ignitia and the Fallen yell behind her as she yipped and felt the air literally melt under her wings. Where it was normally firm, here it was not.

She flapped madly for a moment as the air whistled, and the black cliff-face rocketed upwards behind her like the passage of a speedily moving giant, mechanical tread.

Spyra was able to find some vantage, but not before dread stabbed into her gut and weighed down into her feet. She flapped and pumped her joints, her scapulas aching.

Eventually, she leveled out into a lazy foray, having to give a few more kicked before she was level with the other side of the gap. She hit the edge, sending rocks and snow tumbling down the drop in a series of crumbles as she scrabbled to catch her footing. Colcrus hurried over and gripped her paws, hauling on his hinds until both dragons tumbled into the snow and away from danger.

"-_Oof~!_" Colcrus had the wind knocked out of him as he landed on his back in a sprawl. He came to, and gawked when he saw Spyra peering down at him. "…U-Uhh…"

Spyra was straddling him.

"-_You motherfucker-~!_"

Both of them glanced over to the other side of the gap as the Fallen's explosive insult echoed around the mountains.

_Fucker….fucker….fucker…._

He appeared to leap almost ten feet in the air, with his arms swinging in exasperation.

"-_Get your filthy paws off my sexy purple-derg~!_"

_Derg….derg….derg…._

"W-What did he just call you?" Colcrus swallowed as Spyra snarled and sprang off of him.

"Thanks for the save, _new guy._" She spat. "And I dunno', probably somethin' else I'll struggle to accept. By the way, you should probably run."

"Wait, what? Why?" Colcrus dusted himself off with his wings and preened them to cast all the snow off.

"My mate's possessive." She wing-shrugged. "Eh, I guess I sorta' am too."

"-_Ouch! F-Fallen! _That was my foot…" Ignitia grumpily complained as she touched down beside them. The Fallen looked like a spring as he appeared to leap clear from one dragon to another in an inhuman display of acrobatics.

Before Colcrus could even blink, there was a crunch of snow in front of him, and a slightly taller, yet more imposing being was looming over him and in his face.

The Ice Drake had faced OgreOrcs in frontline combat.

He'd seen some shit.

Yet, somehow he found himself shrinking under the angry gaze of the human, whose face had turned nearly as crimson as Ignitia's scales. His eyes were big and focused entirely on him, and his mouth was a thin, unreadable line.

"…-_u-uhm…_" Colcrus squeaked. "…_a-are you alright-?_"

"If you ever touch my goods again, I'll pop your head off your shoulders like it's a wine cork." The Fallen growled.

"_…I-I was only trying to help-_"

"_Like. A. Cork._" He jammed his finger into Colcrus' nose with each syllable. Then, he made a loud popping noise with his lips. Colcrus yipped and scurried away in terror.

"H-How protective." Ignitia stuttered, rooted in place as Spyra brushed the Fallen's hip and followed after Terradora. "That's a-always a good trait in a-a- u-uhm… a _male._"

"**_YO-DA-LAY-HEE-HOOOO~!_**"

The Fallen dropped everything and peered in horror at one of the mountaintops overlooking the pass.

Conscience stood high up there, dressed in a full-fledged pair of _Lederhosen,_ holding up a sign that showed a blown-up photograph of a running river.

The Fallen quivered with after-rage and the apparition vanished as quickly as it appeared. When he blinked it all away and refocused on Ignitia, he saw that the dragoness was still standing there, wide-eyed and hungrily staring at him.

"…Uh, _yes._" He cleared his throat and straightened his posture. "A guy's got to keep an eye on his treasure, _especially_ when it's pristine, matronly and sweet on the inside."

Ignitia _moaned._

She instantly slapped her paws over her snout and fell on her backside, trembles wriggling their ways up and down her crimson-scaled body.

"_Hurry up, you two!_" –Spyra echoed from the pathway.

"Hm, an adventure delving inside an ancient burial ground." The Fallen harrumphed, hands on his hips as he blinked at the distant tunnel entrance. "This could be interesting. What do you think, Ignitia?"

The poor Guardian let go of her own mouth for only a second, before a pathetic '_eep!' _–came out and she shut it with her claws again, shivering with half-lidded eyes.

"_Real_ interesting." He patted her shoulder. "Spyra says you people have ice cream back inside the city. I'm getting a tub of the shit when we get back. You and me and Spyra can share it. So let's go, Guardian, come on, on your shaky, delectably frail paws you go."

* * *

{🐉}


	36. Chapter 35 -An End to that Which is Good

**Dragon(s)layer**

**35**

* * *

**An End to that Which is Good**

* * *

It rained over the city _again._

So no fireworks. _Again._

However, Morinth's attention wouldn't have been stolen by the celebrations even if they had actually occurred: because Taliopia's silence was beginning to get to her.

After the condensed disaster that was their interaction with her mother and father last night, the normally meek nurse had taken to locking herself away inside the nesting chamber of their commonhouse suite. Taliopia transformed herself into a quivering ball of blankets, sheets and pillows as she rolled up everything around her, like she was a big magnet, and then settled among it all to brood. All the while, she refused to speak with Morinth.

The medic- over the course of several hours and always when Morinth's back was turned -gathered up possibly every stuffed animal she owned and had them sprinkled all over the nest around herself like they were charms meant to ward off a mob of circling demons. Stuffed cats, stuffed dogs, _lots _of stuffed dragons, there were dolphins, rabbits, birds, and even a _lobster_.

Morinth didn't even remember where Taliopia had gotten that one, but it was there, oddly enough, staring up at her with lifeless, button-eyes every time she came into the nestroom to get something out of her dresser or to dig a book out of the splitwise shelf ahead of the nest's frame.

Any efforts Morinth made to get Tali' out of the bedding was met with hollow sniffles and shuddering sighs. She tried once to yank Taliopia physically out of the blankets, but that just made her cry. Morinth never followed completely through with it when the sound of her doctoring dragoness' sadness drove her to tears as well. Taliopia had scurried back into her cocoon like a terrified mouse, and Morinth had scurried into the foyer similarly, the unwilling battle becoming a route on both ends.

While it was true, Morinth's venom was aimed completely at Taliopia's family and their dreadful behavior, there was another part of it being directed at herself.

She felt like complete and utter shit, and the scary part was that the depression was awfully familiar. Ironically, it echoed of the times that Meraleethe was so judgmental of in her past, when Morinth had been an orphan in the wake of a doomed love affair, and had been forced to live literally in the drainage runs beneath Warfang's streets.

She never talked with Taliopia much about her _'old life' _–as she sometimes put it. There was a lot there unspoken and hidden, many things that haunted Morinth's dreams at night when she was feeling particularly down, which was fortunately hard to achieve.

And how couldn't it be?

Morinth had been dealing with segregation since the day she was born. She was resilient, because the world had stacked so much against her.

If it wasn't enough that her father was a damned Nightkin and she was labeled a half-breed, her past as a gutter-runner had caught up to her more than once, and had further earned a multitude of dragons' judgmental displeasures. Her mother had essentially abandoned her, she had lived out her childhood literally swimming in other people's shit, and she had never had a social circle larger than three or so individuals at a time.

_Plus,_ she was gay.

Or perhaps bisexual now, in the wake of the wonderous fuck-beast that was the Fallen.

The denizens of draconic society had proven that they didn't cope with being gay so well, or, rather with having people oriented as such in their presence. When Morinth had first started leaving the tunnels, long before she met Taliopia, the word '_bigot' _–tended to fly out of her snout a lot, and she used it with conversational promiscuity to the dot.

She'd tried to reason with herself that taking all of that anger out on the whole world was unreasonable.

But when days like these happened, and it all came crashing down on the more vulnerable of the two, she found herself struggling to not give in to the fervent rage that had been building in her chest for years.

It wasn't like she could just push the incident from her mind either.

She loved Taliopia too much.

And in addition, their entire home was modeled in a way that made such impossible. Sometimes, she regretted that joyous afternoon when they had first moved in, where she had agreed to Taliopia's decision to stylize the suite entirely off of their scale colors.

"_It'll be so cute, Morri-poo!_" –She had exclaimed. "_It'll be our little house._"

And so, everything was black and white, literally, or brown for the walls and the wooden floors.

There were two dressers and two nightstands on either side of the nest: one pair was painted black, one white. The nest itself was a blend of black and white sheets and cushions. The bookshelf against the northern wall had been a craftsy project, and Taliopia had painted it split down the middle, one half dark, the other light, each side respectively stocked with that dragon's taste in reading material.

The sprawling alchemy station that took up one side of the whole suite was also a big honking flag in her face. All the little vials and tubes that Tali' experimented with, mixed elixirs with, giggled over when plumes of rainbow-colored dust popped out from their necks...

…The only way Morinth could get her mate out of her mind was to leave the commonhouse. And against her better judgment, she decided to do just that.

When she went for a brief while to walk in the rain, it gave her time to think as she prowled the drizzling streets of Warfang.

Now that she was giving the issue some attention, she realized that she felt guilty. All of this time, she hadn't been exerting the same amount of worry over Spyra and the Fallen as she had over Taliopia.

_They_ were the ones on the front lines right now. Didn't they deserve the good wishes more than her and the nurse's melodramatic familial spat?

"_-Come quickly~!_" –A dragon's booming voice echoed through the tapping rainfall down the street. Morinth and a few nearby pedestrians stopped in their tracks to follow the sound with their eyes.

"_It is true! It's been done!_" –A Mole cried.

Gradually, murmurs rose up and a small crowd gathered on the side of the street, even a passing carriage driver yanked his horses to a halt so he and a trio of Mole passengers could hop out and eavesdrop.

There was a Warfangian scout still dressed in very damaged armor, he sported dressings on his front limbs and his neck. As Morinth wandered into the rear ranks of the crowd, she had to balance herself on her hinds to get a good look at the drake.

She gasped when the full details of the damage wrought to his form hit her.

"News from Oversight." –Another dragon by the messenger's flank waved around a tie-bound scroll like it was some sort of trophy to behold. "The siege has been broken!"

Gasps and cheers rippled through the little gathering. Nearby in some distant blocks, more commotion could be heard as another crowd received their own news. A trio of dragons zipped over the rooftops high on the wing headed for Castle Wyrm, and suddenly, Warfang seemed abuzz.

"General Caulnos and Councilor Starbrun are organizing the relief trains as we speak." The messenger announced to the crowd, preening his wings for emphasis. It was just then that Morinth noticed that half of his tail was missing from the midpoint up, the stump sealed with wrappages of cloth. "At such a high price, the days west are dark, but it cannot take away from what we should be celebrating: which is that the city has been liberated."

Morinth was deaf to the subsequent rounds of light applause and cheers. A few heads over, an overeager Fire Drake reared his head back and spouted a bubbling plume of flames into the air like a makeshift close-to-ground firework display. People seemed genuinely relieved at such news.

But Morinth was too busy having a hard time breathing.

Oh Ancestors, what had happened over there?

"-W-What news of the Purple Dragon?" She cried, trying to rear her long neck back as far as possible to be heard. "Has anyone any idea what has happened to her during the battle?"

The cheers quieted down and several of the bystanders began to nervously switch gazes to Morinth and the two dragons in the center of the congregation. Morinth ignored the handful of sneers she received and remained stern.

Yeah, it was widely known what her heritage was to several dragons. But it was also known that she was a soldier just as much as that messenger up there.

The subject matter stepped past the announcer who still clutched his scroll, almost like it was a precious sculpture of glass. The messenger gave a nod, addressing her over a series of horned heads.

"She and the Fallen are the ones who broke it. They drove off General Urukal himself and saved Crownhorn Castle." He explained. "Both of them fought bravely, and were recovering inside the castle when I last laid eyes upon them."

More gasps and muttering.

"T-They…. They _broke_ it? B-By themsel-?" Morinth was cut off when someone else in the crowd shouted.

"What of Lady Cyrila after her kidnapping! Where has the Guardian of Ice gone?"

Agreeing cries and proclamations roused in the wake of such a thing, drowning Morinth out and shrinking her back to the same monotony she had arrived with. The messenger held up his wings for calm.

"The Purple Dragon and Lady Ignitia are leading a party deep into the mountains, to make a rescue attempt." He said. "Lady Terradora and the Fallen have joined them."

Now, the crowd was buzzing like a swarm of locusts. Morinth clicked her tongue as a few pushes went her way, and she was squeezed out the back of the pool of dragons and Moles.

"Do you know anything else?" She tried to holler, but the commotion was too much, and the messenger was too embroiled in a conversation with a small group of other dragons for her to be heard.

Taliopia would've sulked off at being ignored.

The problem was, Morinth _wasn't_ Taliopia.

Suddenly, a tail and the thorny ass it was attached to were shoved in the dragoness' face, making her sputter and curse.

"-_Ouch-! _Bloody hell, rude much?"

"Watch where you're going." A large Earth Drake grunted, despite _him_ backing into her on his own volition.

Morinth ground her fangs, spread her night-black wings, and gave them a mighty pump. As soon as she lifted off the street, she used the drake's head as a springboard and catapulted herself over the whole crowd in a clean glide. The drake's face nearly ate the street as he tumbled onto his belly.

"-_Hey-!_" Her impromptu victim distantly barked. She sniggered under her breath and landed loudly right behind the messenger, who spun around in startlement to face her.

"You came directly from Oversight," Morinth swatted at the scroll-reading dragon with her tail when he opened his mouth, keeping the floor to herself. She stepped forward and raised a brow. "_yes?_"

"Yes, I did." The messenger nodded stoically. "I flew the western route, over the edge of Southern Avalar."

"Cheeky good." She flashed a grin. "Now, what else do you know about the party going into the mountains? The battle must have concluded quite up-and-up if you all are comfortable enough to let them outside the walls…"

"The battle was won completely. Urukal's army was annihilated to a man, or, rather a _Grublin,_ but…" He glanced back at the bandaged stub capping his tail and sighed. "-the cost was quite great."

"Casualties?"

"…High." Was all he muttered, staring at the street. "The Orc bastard General himself escaped capture or death, and the majority of Chieftain Saxony's fleet was able to get out of the blockade pocket, but Oversight is ours again, either way."

"And the party?" Morinth was almost in his face, causing the poor drake to back up a step. "Have you heard of anything else? Is the Purple Dragon wounded? What about the Fallen? How badly?"

"Why is this such important news to _you_ I wonder?" The scroll-holding dragon commented by her flank, his eyes trailing down her arm judgmentally. "I didn't think _Nightkin_ would ever applaud the Dark Army's so reflective failures."

"I am _not_ Nightkin." She snapped at him, her emerald eyes burning holes into the drake's forehead as a canid growl rumbled in her chest. "I never was, and never bloody well will be. We've all got a little mud in the veins I'd rightly say, at the end of the day. Even _you._" She pointed a wingtip at him.

The drake sneered, and her inner-soldier quickly picked out how his chest muscles bundled in the classic draconic-preparations for a feral leap.

The messenger glanced between the two of them, coughing and scratching at his crown. Morinth was relieved to see someone with no vested interest in what many would call her '_condition' _–but he also seemed disinterested in siding with her, as well.

"The only thing I know of the party, is that they are facing a force led by the Cloud Ripper." He told her, bowing his head. "Information has been scarce beyond that, as my unit nor any of the others possess enough wyrms to aid them at all. I only bear all of what I was given. I apologize if this wasn't… _enough._"

"No, no, it's not your fault." Morinth huffed defeatedly.

"If you'll excuse me, I am weary from much fighting and travel…"

Morinth was already turning away and trotting around the fracturing center of the dispersing crowd. She made sure to shoot the scroll-holder a hateful glare as she blended back in with the usual late-hour foot-traffic of Warfang's streets. The messenger took to the wing off in the direction of Castle Wyrm. With the way he looked, she was surprised he had even bothered to carry out distributing his message like his CO's had no doubt ordered.

For such news, the city looked relatively bleak. Everything was colorless, even the bronze and gold trimmings on all the architecture. The rain had mitigated into an only barely-felt drizzle that moistened the scales on Morinth's black coat. Her thoughts swam madly around what she had heard as she altered her route to go back to the commonhouse.

So Spyra and the Fallen had really done it. They'd proven just how integral they really were in all of this. Morinth couldn't say she was altogether shocked, what with everything she'd witnessed them do already…

But now, that esteem would become official for way more people than just her.

So many developments.

So much to do, too.

So much to take the Fallen's attention away from her and Taliopia. Which of course, was now an anxiety she was experiencing.

"Well, shit." She mumbled, looking down at her paws as rain dripped from the tip of her snout. "I see now why Spyra's so attached to him."

Wet stone suddenly clicked, and a puddle in the walk-divet behind her splashed. Morinth lazily sifted a wing over and peered at an approaching shape separate from any pedestrians.

Immediately, that growl she had sported earlier started to rev back up.

"_Rava,_" She spat, turning fully around, making sure the Lightning hen saw her talons slip out of their sheaths. Soot crawled from Morinth's snout and her chest glowed a faint amber. "unless you well want two black eyes, a missing fang and a snout more obtuse than a cheeky triangle, I'd recommend backing off. I'm not in a good mood today."

"G-Good afternoon, Morinth." Rava quaintly stopped a good distance away, and even offered a sheepish little smile. "Uhm… I didn't mean to upset you."

That was… pretty disarming, actually.

But Morinth knew Rava better than probably anyone.

Mostly because the two of them had spent their academy years beating the piss out of one another. It was hard to flinch against someone whose bodily fluids had been all over you, whether that be blood or something else, it remained irrelevant.

She could tell when the Electric Dragon was up to no good just by giving a brief whiff of the air around her. Rava _stank_ of the shit she behaved like.

Still, she'd never entered a battle-plan for confrontation by being apologetic. Not even mockingly, Rava would never have done it. She was more the female who greeted someone she disliked by punching them in the mouth.

Her nails slid back just a bit, but Morinth relaxed little in her combat pose, ready to take a strike at any second.

"What do you want?" She sneered. "And before you start chalking up some little scheme to get at me, just know that I have lo-" She swallowed, choking off her sentence.

Should she say it?

….Eh.

What harm was there? It wasn't entirely a lie anyway.

"I have _loved ones_ in Oversight at the moment. I just might bloody well kill the first loudmouth I meet. _Especially_ if their breath happens to have lightning bolts in it."

"S-Scheme? _No,_ Morinth, I didn't come here to scheme, or to get at you, or… why… H-How _dare_ you assume that-!"

Rava shuddered, like she had stuck her foot in a bucket full of ice-water.

Right there was just a flicker of the dragoness Morinth had so hated when they were both younger. That dagger-voiced, angry bully who had to get loud and put her paws on others to solve her problems. But just as quickly as that ugly face appeared, it vanished.

Rava coughed and sat back, closing her eyes as she practiced a few calming breaths.

Morinth blinked.

Wow.

Bitches could learn anger-management, she supposed… it was just crazy to see someone who had actually mastered it.

"No Morinth, I didn't approach you just now with ill-intent, and that I can assure you." Rava tried another smile. It was evident that it was an expression she wasn't used to or even good at making. "Soldier's oath? Cross my wings, really."

"_Mmmm,_ that would be really low even for _you_ to go against." Morinth narrowed an eye.

"I was passing by when I heard the messenger give news on Oversight. It's relieving, is it not?"

"It's nerve-wracking, actually." Morinth shivered. "Not knowing what the state is of my friends at all, not being there to make sure they're okay? Bloody terrible, that. With all good news comes the weight it rode in on."

"Did you have any friends in the units deployed there?" Rava asked.

"Who?" Morinth smiled savagely. "_Me? _Come around back to reality, dearie', you're _looossssinngggg meeee~._"

"…Blood isn't everything." The Electric Dragon swallowed.

"That's a compelling argument alone, much less that… that _thing_ you keep doing with your face. What the hell is that?"

"W-What? I-I'm… I'm smiling, see!"

Morinth cringed when Rava put even _more_ effort into it, and made it tens times worse. Her snout looked like it was distorting.

"I've changed since we last spoke, so much too. Really, I've been working hard to make myself more, ehm… _presentable,_ and sociable. Aren't dragons supposed to smile when they approach a friend?"

"Maybe some do, but cheeky that: we _aren't_ friends." Morinth reminded coldly. "And I don't see a well right reason to change how that is. Look, there has to be some reason you've bothered to hunt me down out here, and if it isn't to start a fight, I can't imagine what else it could be."

"-Morinth, that's part of why I'm here, I…" Rava stammered. "-I wanted to say that I- I-I'm-"

She gave off a pathetic, defeated huff, slumping onto the street and bowing her head as her wings wilted.

"_Damn it._" She brought a fist down on the cobblestone with a tiny splash. "…And I knew this would happen, and I tried anyway. I knew I wouldn't be able to say it to you. Not to you or to Taliopia. The others were easier, but not you two."

"Rav'," Morinth couldn't believe it when her muscles started to relax, and her back stopped hunching. It was a slow transformation, something someone would have to focus on to notice its happening.

"I-" Another huff. Rava couldn't even look at her anymore. "…I'm really messing this up."

"Rav'," Morinth sat down in front of her and cocked her head. "what exactly have you been saying to other dragons? What are you _trying _to say to me?"

"…._*sigh*… _I didn't want it to sound manufactured." Rava chuffed tiredly, looking off at the street by their side as a wagon trundled through the light drizzle, the horses neighing and galloping cleanly. "I had gone over it again and again in my head, just so that I didn't sound like I had written a card I sent to twenty dragons in the interest of time. I wanted it to be genuine, and-"

"So then be fucking blunt with me already."

Rava looked at the sky and then settled her golden eyes on Morinth's. She took a breath.

"Morinth, I want to apologize for how I treated you and Taliopia during our time in the Academy and immediately after it. It was inappropriate of me and baselessly abusive. I was judgmental, and I allowed that to take over my behavior, and I took my problems out on the two of you. Taliopia didn't deserve that, and you didn't deserve that."

The street pattered under the drizzling shower, and it even beat off of both dragons' wings, each drop giving off muted, tiny thumps, like water bouncing off the side of a canvas tent.

"…Yes, I'm sorry." Rava coughed, her tail whipping as she played with her paws to avoid eye-contact. The proclamation had obviously been difficult for her to get out. She was turning pink, and her breathing was tight. "Yes."

"…."

"-…Well? Aren't you going to say something? Huh? Anything, c'mon, Morinth!"

"You might have to give me a minute to unpack all that, luv." Morinth was looking past Rava's crown, locked in deep thought. "I have to give it to you, if this is one of your cheap shots, it is the most intricate one I've ever seen you pull."

Rava deflated with a huffing laugh. Her wrist trembled as she clenched the bridge of her snout quickly and took her paw away. It looked like she was fighting to keep tears back.

Holy crap, the world must have been coming to an end.

…Well, technically, it _was already._

"I just need you to say you believe me. I'm not asking for forgiveness, or even for you to understand. But I… I need to know that you know I'm being sincere." Rava chanced taking a step closer, and lowered her voice. "_Please,_ Morinth, I don't think I can take another day knowing that I haven't mended my biggest mistakes in some way. Please, just let me have this, and I promise, I'll never bother you or get in your way for anything ever again, I-"

"Do you have any plans this afternoon?"

Immediately, something bloomed in Rava's chest that she couldn't quite explain. It was a broiling heat that cindered painfully against the inside of her skin and cooked her tongue.

She stared at Morinth as their roles of silence switched completely. Her mouth was hanging open with a general glaze of sparking stupor.

"…Rav'? Uh… _Rava? Raaaaa-vaaaaaa~ …?_" Morinth sang lightly, waving a paw in front of her snout. "Oh my god, Rava, are you alright?"

"-Y-Yes-!" Rava yipped, licking her chops and pawing at her face. The Electric Dragon glanced around nervously and cleared her throat. "-I didn't expect you t-to ask something like that. No. No I don't have any plans. Windshear isn't on duty today, and, a-as you can imagine, I'm not exactly popular in the barracks cliques."

"Ah…. Good." Morinth awkwardly reclined. At least there was some genuine amusement behind the following smile. "I know a bakery a few streets over that serves brew along with the usual pastry stock! And let me tell you, the brew is _deeee-lisssshhhh~!_"

"O-Oh, great! Yes…" Rava must have been expecting a much worse outcome, because she was _way_ off her game now. Her wings bounced a bit, and to Morinth's slight worrying, she looked like she was at risk of fainting. "That sounds very nice. I just happened to miss my own morning pickmeup today! Thus… good. So just… just you and me? As in who's going, I mean..."

"_Duh,_ who else?" Morinth chuckled.

"What about Taliopia? How come she isn't with you? That apology was meant for her too…"

"She's a bit under the weather at the moment." Morinth sighed. "Last night was a bit rough due to… er, _family issues._"

"Oh, poor dear."

Morinth felt her heart skip a beat.

Since when did the local block's dirtbag bruiser ever sound like a fretting nursery nanny? The Rava she had known for so long would've sooner pissed on someone's grave or spit in a baby's cereal. Though, it did fit the current apocalyptic outlook of the last month, she supposed.

After all, a chunk of the sky had already fell, and to boot, Morinth had wound up having sex with the alien man inside said chunk.

Which if the constant burning background-libido told her anything, she was almost desperate to reexperience for a second time…

"...Anyway," Morinth hummed uncomfortably, suddenly noticing a slight cold drip in the center of a flare of intense heat under her tail. "here, follow me. This place is amazing, I mean really good! And you will become _addiccc-tteeddd~! _To whatever they have as the daily-special. My treat!"

* * *

{🐉}

You know those moments where something so unexpectedly whack-ass happens that you cannot process it, even as it's in motion right in front of your face? Morinth and Rava covered it up pretty well, but both were really beginning to wonder if this was a dream.

This wasn't to say that they were _fluent._ Morinth's normally bubbly behavior was muted the majority of the time as she traveled beside the Electric Dragoness for a few streets. She had now listened to Rava normally speaking for the longest string of sentences she had ever heard from her in her entire life. There hadn't been much room for _talking_ in the past, when all the punches and insults had flown.

In fact, Morinth was quite sure she hadn't held an actual conversation with Rava once over the entire decade they'd known of each other.

It was a challenge, trying to be sociable with this dragoness who she literally knew nothing about and had spent a long time hating.

Not that she was naïve enough to let her outlook on Rava change just on the snap of some talons. Morinth still kept her guard up in case of some impending jab or springing of some trap. Rava either legitimately detected this or faked her reactive sadness. She couldn't actually be _that_ bothered by how things had been left, could she?

What happened to the spiteful bitch from the female dorms?

Morinth wasn't believing that this was the same wyrm. They were obviously a shapeshifter, who had done away with the real Rava and was now trying to impersonate her normally foul mood with a contrasting meekish one.

"Where did they first deploy you once you cleared the last rounds?" Rava asked her.

"Rearline, of course." Morinth chuckled. "17th Flight under Captain Berogas, 7th Wing. That cheeky bastard was a loon. He liked to call his squad the _seven-sevens,_ and he even carved the little number on the dish-edges of his pauldrons. I think he got all the rookies that the logisticians didn't have the patience to sort through rightly."

"Things were messy for a while," Rava agreed with a little shrug. "I just think the officers were afraid of creating a meat-grinder for children."

"Did they really avoid it though, Rav'?"

"You don't believe they did?"

"The average casualty is two years younger than me." Morinth tried to ignore the traumatic heaviness weighing in her gut. She shakily sighed when the memory of her own guts hanging out sprang back into her mind. If she wasn't walking, she would've raised a forepaw to cup her stomach self-consciously. "That makes it feel so bloody unsightly, really: why should the older not take such a place, I wonder? Isn't that what nature intended?"

"I can't answer that." Rava huffed, looking off to the side of the road. "How old are you anyway?"

"Twenty-two. Yourself?"

"Twenty-four." Rava turned back and blinked at her. "You always sounded… I don't know, _older._ You're really younger than me?"

"Some wake up faster than others." Morinth cringed a little as soon as the words left her snout. She stealthily craned an eye over at Rava to see her undoubtedly flushed and angry reaction.

Instead, what she got was a bit of a sulking hang of the dragon's head, and a very deep frown.

"Yes, I… I guess you're right." Rava mumbled. "Morinth, back then-"

"We're here."

Rava almost face-planted into the door, and Morinth almost fed it to her when she swung it open and held it for her former enemy, using it as an excuse to end the ugly conversation before it could even take root.

The little bakery was built below street level, carved into the foundation of a large commonhouse sprawling above, and accessible only via a little alleyway diverting from the street and going down. It was dark, and lit by low-bloom candles on every little table, some windows at foot-level of the street above let in blindingly stark towers of angled light.

Morinth hopped up into her chair first and played with the mixer in her brew as she waited for her unusual companion to come back with her own order. She crinkled her snout when she noticed that Rava hadn't even bothered with any cubes from the little bowl between them and was sipping it _black._

"_Eeeee-EEWWWW, Ravvv'~_" –Morinth sang musingly, tailtip pointing at her mug. "At least put a little something in it."

"You're the one who said the brew here was the best." Rava wing-shrugged and took another sip. "I think it's good enough to be on its own. Besides, I normally don't have it like this back at the barracks."

"_Ugh,_ they mix nasty diarrhea in mugs at the barracks." Morinth stuck her tongue out.

"That's why I add cubes to theirs. I don't even think it's real brew."

They only realized they had shared a collective, very girlish giggle after the fact, and thusly both dragons went very quiet for a moment.

"So this was why you were so eager to get our ears the other day." Morinth stirred her cup and watched the brew spiral inside. "To patch up old wounds. That's just cheeky, Rav'."

"To right old wrongs." Rava corrected sheepishly. "It hasn't sat well in my stomach, who I was. I've been trying to find everyone, and, as you can guess, the ones I have found haven't all been so forgiving."

"I hope you didn't jump in expecting otherwise."

"No! Not at all…" Rava sighed. "…But Ancestors, those freaking hurt. I think the real mistake I made was forgetting the viscosity of it all."

Rava looked up at her, and Morinth blinked when the face before her appeared in a shade of misery that hadn't been present on the street outside.

"I… I threatened to hurt Taliopia, many times." Rava muttered. "There are nights where I haven't slept."

"Ancient Lords, this really does bother you." Morinth realized now that Rava actually looked terrible. Color had drained from her facial scales and her eyes were a bit sunken. "…Though I can't well say it doesn't bother me too, and while I'll be humble here at this table with you, I also want to say that I don't rightly or unrightly fancy letting it all go to pasture. You really hurt my Taliopia."

"I know." Rava buried her snout in her brew, shivering as she sighed. "And I hate it. I hate it so much."

"Mmm, well…" Morinth struggled to find the right words. "…well I hate it too."

That seemed to make Rava want to shrink into her chair even more. The Electric Dragon shut her eyes and chewed on her lower chop.

"_Sooooo~,_" Morinth sing-songedly switched the subject after taking a bite out of her pastry. "-where did the stuck-ups drop you off after?"

"4th Flight." Rava said lowly. "We were in rearline for a month, and then we had our first skirmish in the northwestern forests, far from the wall."

"It sounds like something happened."

"Do you remember Nera?"

Morinth clicked her tongue as memories flooded back through her horned head.

Nera had been a beautiful Fire Dragoness who had been friends with Rava throughout the academy years. For all that beauty, though, her attitude had been one of the ugliest, broiling sacks of crap Morinth had ever laid eyes on. She'd always join Rava's little gang to torture the other smaller females, and in particular before Morinth had broken her nose one evening with a café-plate, Taliopia.

"Cheeky that. 'Course I remember pretty Nera." Morinth smiled humorlessly. "She didn't look so pretty after I broke her face with that tupperwear, though. Wasn't she the one that got caught mating behind the classroom building?"

"I-I wasn't involved in anything Nera did outside my friend-circle." Rava took a tiny bite out of her own pastry. "But she was in my Wing for that deployment, the only dragon I recognized."

"Ah, I'm sure you two had a blast taking out all of that ungodly hormonal-rage on the enemy."

"…N-No, she, uhm… she died." Rava cleared her throat, still refusing eye contact. Morinth's wings twitched in surprise. "She actually died in my arms."

"…Oh." Morinth swallowed. Nera? _Dead? _That was so unreal, just like this whole situation. Nera had been a complete bitch, but that didn't warrant her death by far. "How?"

"She got into melee combat with an Orc." Rava said. "She disarmed it, and it still killed her. It fought like a rabid animal. They tore each other's throats out. She bled to death before a healer could reach her. I had never seen so much blood in my whole life."

"That's terrible." Morinth grunted. "So is that the cheeky tale? The witnessing of death showed you the limited time we all have?"

"_Yes._" Rava growled, suddenly sounding a little angry. She looked at Morinth straight and spoke with real conviction. "Seeing Nera die opened my eyes. Before the skirmish, when me and her reunited, I remember what I said to her, and how I treated her. I treated her like she was still my toadie, back in the dorms, and I belittled her, and called her names to assert dominance, and she took it, because she was afraid of me. I see her face every single night now. She wouldn't look me in the eyes as I held her, with all her blood gushing over my arms and my chest, I think because she really did hate me, deep down somewhere, and I think she was angry that _I_ was the last dragon she saw."

_And do you blame her? –_Morinth almost spat at her.

Last night still had her so mightily pissed off, and the opportunity to take it out on someone with such devastating effect was almost irresistible.

Morinth instead shoved the entire rest of her pastry down her throat to shut herself up, her scaly cheeks bulging as she struggled to chew the huge bite.

Rava took a moment to collect herself with a shivery breath before more quietly continuing, reverting back to her prior more timid self.

"I needed to change the way I behaved and how I lived my life. Because yes, Morinth, life _is_ too short, and I have no desire to waste my time with others anymore by getting into fights with them and saying horrible things to them to make myself feel powerful." Rava sipped the last of her brew and smacked her chops. "I know some other dragons have scoffed how dramatic I am over my apologies-list, and even Windshear sees it as a waste of time: but it isn't to me, Morinth. I see it as the only meager thing I can manage to repay _something_ for the last hours I spent with Nera, and for all the pain I caused before that. It's a truly sour thing to know it's my last impression with so many dragons, but, after today I can say that list is just a bit shorter."

Rava glowered at her cup, glancing up at Morinth's empty mug and then back into her own again.

"Life sucks." She concluded.

"Mm, I hear that." Morinth swallowed a last mouthful and pushed her empty plate away. "I lied earlier: Taliopia isn't sick at all. She's furious at me and chronically depressed over my less-than-shining descriptions of her shortcomings I said when I ranted at her parents. They resent their own daughter because she's a dyke, and I believe they legitimately wish for my untimely death every night that they cheeky well go to sleep. It's a bloody shame my mum was such an arsehole' and threw me down a storm-drain after my father ran off to who-knows-where. At least me and Tali' would have some in-laws, or some relatives and family at all, who could give our relationship some support. But, oh well, eh? Life sucks."

"Aye." Rava growled. She looked at their cups again. "…Does this place serve anything spiked?"

"No, why?"

"You wanna' go get drunk?"

"…Hm, actually" Morinth slid off her chair and pushed it in with her tail, giving Rava a clean smile. "that sounds _won-derr-fuuulll~._"

* * *

{🐉}

"**_Meep!_**"

"Nownow there, yu put dat bak where you done and rightly foun it, ya ear me? Bad Meep!"

The little sewage-apus pouted with a narrowed eye, only replacing the little dragon figurine on the shelf when Palmet brought up a finger to wag.

"No more pillagin fer dis Ape there aint. We's all turned round and rightly! Takin up some sorta _new-leef,_ I fink the expressionlissness be. _Oi,_ c'mon then my little Bucket-Buddy, it's break time."

Palmet itched a disturbance by his asscrack and held down a broad, furry arm for the little creature to scuttle up. Meep deftly scrabbled to his wide shoulders and settled with a tiny purr into his mane.

Palmet collected his mop and bucket and tossed them in his new room (the same he obliviously hadn't realized was a closet) –and took a moment to lumber down the halls of the Guardian Temple, picking up a plate of food left by the front doors for lunch.

Ignitia had organized Bilou to drop off meals for the curiously located Ape twice a day when she was out and about with Spyra and his Master, the Fallen. Luckily, the jumpy, chronically ill assistant hadn't caught sight of Palmet himself, and had been lied to that the food was really for a, in quote- '_New substitute janitor who was really a dragon' –_and somehow, Bilou had bought it.

"_-Eh-! _Greens!" Palmet stuck his speckly tongue out as he pinched a wad of broccoli off his plate and held it away, like it was the rotting, separated limb of a carcass. "Da horror! Wat are dese drags tryin ta do, _kill me?_"

"**_Meep?_**"

"Wha? Yeahyeah sure, here ya go." He handed the cluster of veggies to Meep, who curled his tentacles under his discus-like body and slowly nibbled on the plumage with the beak-like mouth centered down there. "Aye, I'm guessin I can't be takin it too personal like: that blu fellow still finks we're a bloody drag ourselves he does! Maybe Ignitia will be a lass and let us organize some sorta menu checkin-off-listy-fing. …Eh, but den again, the blu fella would jus probably sneeze boogers all over it he would."

"**_Meep._**" The land-octopus crunched his broccoli quietly as Palmet sat down and gnawed on some mutton. "**_Meep? Meep._**"

"_Ha~! _Dose be sum fightin words, young masta! Be somewhat cautiously and humble-bumble there tho, not everyone's got a setta ballz dat big they dont." Palmet glanced around the decorated foyer of the temple, taking in all the banners, the carvings, the exquisite metal-work. The Ape sighed. "Iz a good fing I got ya here wit me, Meep. I fink I'd go rightly mad without the companeez and likewise. Everyone needs a good un to talk tu, aye?"

"**_Meep._**"

"Yeah, I find ya inspirin and literarily competent too. I've nevva had a bettah Bucket-Buddy in my whole days I haven't. But, Meep, didntya evva get the feelin yous was a little… _homesick?_"

Meep paused in his crunching, his eye looking around as if in search of an answer to his question. Eventually, all the little creature did was shrug two of his tentacles, and jam the rest of the green stalk in its beak.

"I ain't complainin about the employment opportunes and whatnot from da Master, he's a way bigga and bettah boss then the Mistress evva was. But this whole shiny and glory-fying feel jus don't feel normal tu me. Maybe some good shroom-trees growin out of the ruined walls, or some sludge-stank might make it more homey. I like it here, but I miss dem swamps a tad." Palmet grunted as he ate. "Eh, maybe I'm jus goin stircrazy. Ignitia wont lemme clean any of them Guardian's rooms, and all the dust on the floors is makin me bonkers it is! I see it all the time! Passin by in them hallways, and it makes my eye get a twitch it does! Bloody maddening. I guess it's all makin me talk nonsense. We don't need no swamps! Or uvver Apes, cuzz we gots the Master now."

"**_Meep!_**"

Palmet's grin slowly meandered off when Meep took his eye away. Though his words were spoken with conviction, their meaning was a bit hollow deep inside his guts.

He was a foreigner, in the country of a group of peoples he had been reared to hate for his entire life, in a society that valued completely different things. Might made right with the Apes.

But here, there was… _culture._

And even though Palmet considered himself a reformed simian, he did admit that the stuff clung to everything like some nasty-ass stench and was a bit overpowering at times.

Figuratively speaking, at that.

It certainly wasn't his ancestral tribal geography.

"This place woulda probabs been funner ta blow up then clean, now that I fink abou it."

"**_MEEP~!_**" Meep became exasperated, dropping the few shreds of his veggie-meal left.

"Oi, calm ya suction-cups there, I wasn't bein serious!" Palmet laughed. _Not entirely, anyway._

They wandered around the temple to pass time aside from that. Occasionally, Palmet would stop at one of the lower-lying windows and gaze around longingly at the campus island sprawling outside, and the colossal spires and castles of the dragon city layering the horizon beyond in all directions.

He remembered when his fellow Apes used to gather around bonfires and tell each other stories and rumors. The officers who were the more chatty of their file would relent news from the fronts or go over targets they were to prioritize on the field.

So many of them had talked about Warfang and how it was the ultimate prize their Mistress and the Dark Master both wanted to burn.

Palmet had never been a talker, and so he had always been a quiet listener in the backs of the crowds, gnawing meat off of bones and staring at his clawed-feet whilst a commander's bellowing voice rebounded over the crackle of flames.

He was used to seeing mushroom trees and fields of fetid vegetation, or the endless rows of scrubland and geysers up north of the swamps where he'd been born.

Warfang dwarfed everything he had ever seen in his entire life. The overwhelming scale was too much for him to take in at times. It made him muse: none of his fellows out in the brush had had any idea what it was they tried to rouse one another into hoping to take on.

His people had no chance against this.

Cynder used them like expendables. Her army was a gigantic gang she had accrued because Malefora would never have given her Grublins and Orcs of her own.

"Evvalastin poweh-struggle it is." He mumbled to himself. "I fink I'm appreciatin them quietness more than home tho, aye?"

"**_Meep?_**"

"Whatchyu mean '_broken'? _Wot are yu on abou now-"

Palmet blinked when he followed Meep's tentacle pointing down the hall.

There was a window just a few rows down.

It was shattered.

Palmet hurriedly jogged over, arms wide in confused readiness as he swept his gaze over the glittering carpet of glass shards that covered the floor in a wide circle.

The panes had broken _inwards,_ which only meant one thing…

"_Meep!_" Palmet hissed, causing the land-octopus to squeak when he squeezed the poor thing tightly to his chest, his eyes darting around. "-_We gots a burglar on the premises we do!_"

"**_Meep!_**"

"Well wot bloody use is _dat?! _We cant call no onez we cant, nobody out dere knows we're in here cept Ignitia and the Master! And they be halfway across da werld!"

For a moment, a pit of true dread nestled itself inside the Ape's guts.

What if the intruder was a murdering psychopath?

What if they were arsonists?

What if they scuffed the floors he had spent all-day waxing?

Suddenly, Palmet began to growl and grind his tusk-like fangs together as a curtain of indignant rage descended over him.

_Nobody_ undid his janitorial work.

"Nah… _nah! _We don't need no Master or Ignitia ta help us!" Palmet snatched a decorative vase off a nearby table. He smashed it against the wall and took up one of the jagged pieces as a weapon. "C'mon Meep, let's show dis wanker what-for."

* * *

{🐉}

It took Taliopia a long while before her sobs started to die down, and by that point, the sheets for the nest were utterly soaked with tears.

The nurse hiccupped and sniffled as she fell into a maidenly sort of routine: hanging the sheets out of the suite's window balcony to dry, fetching fresh ones from the cabinet and changing the nest, putting all her stuffed animals back in their proper piles on her side of the bedding.

She even went so far as to sweep the whole floor _and_ dust.

Really, it was anything of any monotonous nature that was intended to take her mind off of how upset she was about last night.

After she had left the table and ruined her dress with her crying, Morinth had attempted to console her inside the hen's restroom.

"Taliopia, please, I didn't mean anything I said like that!" Morinth had started to tear up herself, as if the gall couldn't have higher! "I would never try to hurt you, or insult you! Y-You're… You're my Tali-wali…"

"_Yeah! _Yeah sure!" Taliopia sobbed, angrily turning on her mate with a scowl daggering down her snout. "I'm your _Tali-wali_, Morinth, you're Tali-wali who's terrified of inanimate objects and can't take care of herself! _That's_ your Tali-wali right?!"

"Taliopia, no, please," Morinth sniffled, her crown and the decorative loops dangling from it seeming to droop as tears began to rain from her emerald eyes. "-I didn't mean it like that."

"You made me sound like I'm a _burden._" Taliopia wailed. "A-And I guess that really is what I am. A _burden._ T-That's why my parents kicked me out of the lair, that's why you always sigh, and huff whenever I get overwhelmed, and t-that's why _both_ of us want the Fallen!"

"No, Taliopia…" Morinth tried to hug her. "-I-I love you! I would ne- _Tali',_ please come back, _Taliopia-!_"

She'd burst out the doors and started stomping for the building's exit, ignoring the looks she got from startled onlookers as she beelined for an escape.

"Taliopia, there you are." Leetol appeared, and he blocked her path. "This rubbish is completely unnecessary. Come back to the table, please, your mother just-"

"_I hate you!_" Taliopia shouted, jamming her snout nearly into his and growling at him in the most aggressive, foul look she could muster across her pale face.

Leetol staggered back, his eyes wider than the dinner plates on the tables around them.

"…W-What…?" He stammered.

"_I **hate **you!" _She screamed. "I _hate_ you both! All you've ever done to me was rub my failures in my face, and be disappointed in me because I didn't grow up to be how _you_ wanted me to grow up! All I've ever wanted was your approval, and for you to smile at me, _really smile at me! _Y-You can't even do _that!_ M-Mommy can't even look at me, a-and, s-she can't- *_ssnnrff* -t-tell me I look nice and-!_"

Her rant had devolved into hushed bouts of crying after that, the hostile energy she was so unused to harboring burning out as quickly as it arose.

Leetol was stunned enough that she was able to quickly spring around him and take off into the air out the restaurant's doors.

Taliopia could probably declare herself a _master_ of the art of crying, seeing as she did it so much.

But when she got home, she positively _bawled._

Neighbors from all over the commonhouse had gathered outside the doors originally intent on complaining about the noise, but when they heard how upset the frail nurse was, they all simply wandered back home with sheepish cringes on their faces. Taliopia cried so much that her eyes got all puffy, and she couldn't breathe out of her nose.

She eventually fell asleep in her tear-soiled dress, exhausted after the long episode she'd been inflicted with. When she had woken up in the morning, Morinth was there, passed out on her side of the nest, still wearing all of the jewelry and the pauldrons she'd gone out with. Her cheeks were still moist from her own crying.

After that followed the phase of hunkering down and weathering the day under the sheets, surrounded by her army of plush, button-eyed guardians. Taliopia didn't respond to her mate's attempts to talk and didn't move far into the evening, only emerging when Morinth left the flat, and she was alone.

Now, with any and all chores expended and their use as distractions caput, Taliopia could find little else to do beside sprawl out on the guest futon in the foyer, and stare at the paneled ceiling.

The enchanted lanterns that usually lit the flat up at night were turned off, and none of the candles were lit, thusly plunging her little home into the utmost of darkness.

Her rosy eyes glowed pinkish-crimson in the shadows, and so too did the slight illumination given off from the membranes of her wings. Sometimes, she gave the latter a few flexes, and watched with bored fascination as the light dappled strangely off of her surroundings.

Morinth still hadn't come home from wherever she had gone.

…That was…

That was okay.

It was probably best, that they have some time to themselves each anyway.

Taliopia sniffled and crammed a wad of salted seeds in her snout from the tin by the futon's side. She chewed quietly and continued to singe holes through the roof.

She wished the Fallen was here. And Spyra.

Spyra was so beautiful. Taliopia couldn't hide it from herself that she was almost as attracted to her as she was the human warrior. A sick, dirty fantasy started to unravel in her mind about her, the Purple Dragoness and the Fallen all being inside that medical wing's room together, on the same cot, touching each other's-

Taliopia shut her eyes and shivered.

Her and Morinth had never even thought about having an open relationship with one another before. She knew some other dragons who did practice their lives in such a manner, and had never seen the appeal in it for herself.

But after the Fallen had… _been with her,_ in the way he had, it was now all she could think about.

The human's delectable, thick, pointy, twitching, salty-tasting, musk-stinking, lightly furred _junk._

She shivered again, harder this time.

Why did depression and arousal go so claw in claw? She didn't understand it. She was supposed to be angry, and hateful and sad right now, so why the fuck was she so _horny _too?

Maybe it was because she desperately just wanted someone to hold her.

Someone with pale, scaleless skin…

**_BMBMBMBM_**

-The nurse hen yipped and fell off the futon with a clatter against the floor.

Someone had knocked on the front door.

"_-Taliopia?_" Leetol's voice muffled through on the other end. "_It is your father. Please open the door._"

Taliopia bit her tongue and clenched her jaw, trying to stop the overwhelming wave of fresh tears that threatened to burst out of her. She curled up on the floor and quivered, shielding herself with her wings in the dark.

"_Taliopia, please, I just want to talk to you. I…. I did not tell your mother I was coming here._" Leetol could be heard shakily sighing. "_Last night I didn't even have the chance to speak about the end of your journey, and what plans you had now. I did not get the chance… t-to tell you how brave I thought you were, and how proud me and your mother really are of you._"

"Liar." Taliopia croaked through a sniffle. Her father heard her.

"…_We just want what is best for your health and future, Taliopia._"

"W-What's b-b-_best_ for my future, a-and my _health_, i-is if you _go away._" She hiccupped. "I don't want to ever t-talk to you again."

"_I know you do not mean that._"

"-I-I haven't ever meant something so m-much, ever." Taliopia sneered. "-I-I meant it…"

"_Taliopia-_"

"I **_hate you_**_._" She snarled raggedly. "I never want to speak with you or M-Meraleethe again."

The door thudded quietly, but no other words came through.

Now thoroughly drowning in mucus, Taliopia snorted up her snot and started shoveling more salted nuts, coughing when she hiccupped and swallowed wrong.

If only she had some sweets.

Sweets always made pain go away, even if it was only temporarily.

Maybe Leetol should've brought some chocolate or some shit, maybe _then_ she would've given him the time of day.

Alas, it was not to be, and so she suffered in darkness with the assuredness of solitude.

* * *

{🐉}

The tunnel acted as a fanged compacting agent for the mountain winds howling outside. They sang off of the icicles and stalactites dangling from the cavernous ceilings at its various heights and curved lengths. The tune it made was haunting, and beautiful all at the same time.

"_…Woah…_" Spyra's eyes lit up as she took in the massive tunnelway dwarfing the whole party. Reflective, glowing blue crystals fissured through glacial breaches in standing walls made of encrusted ice and black rock. Their illumination bounced around the glassy frozen surfaces everywhere and produced an aqua-colored dapple that somehow made the chambers look even more titanic.

Artificial archways acted as buttressed struts lining down the colossal, subterranean highway as it snaked beneath the mountains. The tunnel was so big that the decrepit remains of what appeared to be a small castle stuck out from the ice and stone a mile ahead of them in the distance, its blackened spires teetering to the left after ages of shifting glaciers and moving earth.

"-Still as immense and mysterious as I recall." Ignitia smiled, coughing. "It's good to see the initial ruins untouched at least."

"Pity for the coffins of our forefathers is simply stupid." Terradora huffed, ignoring the soured glare from her fellow Guardian. "Do not let the scenery distract you all: danger lurks here as much as in the storms outside."

"So _this_ is what all the older dragons used to talk about." Colcrus breathed. "There aren't many Ices who can say they've been to the Tombs of Chrysalis. Looks like I'm one of the rares now."

"But if this is the tomb, then, uh… where are the actual dead people?" Spyra glanced around.

"This is the Path of the Cold, the tombs lie at the very heart of the complex." Ignitia explained. "This is the tunnelway that the Ice Dragons bring their honored dead down in solemn pilgrimages. We'll have to reach the end if we're to stop Cynder. That _has_ to be where she's keeping Cyrila!"

"Ah, yes, I am very eager to meet the third member of the Guardians after all this time. Especially if she's as curvy as the three of you." The Fallen deviously rubbed his palms together. Terradora made a sound of disgust and Ignitia blushed.

"Pfffft, _puh-leeze_ mai-boi-toi', we all know who the _curviest_ 'ness is in this crowd." Spyra took her gaze off of the tunnel and bumped him with her big hips. "Ain't that right?"

"I've maintained my figure quite well for a dragon my age." Ignitia chuffed, giving an appraising look down her spinal scutes and a hop of her butt. The Guardian giggled. She still had a bit of a jiggle to her haunches. Males liked that.

She frowned a bit.

…They did… Right? She hoped so. Cynder's earlier comment of her '_letting herself go' _–rang naggingly in the back of her horned skull.

Meanwhile, Colcrus coughed into his wing and tried his best to ignore the banter as a blue flush began to gather down his snout. Technically, everyone here outranked him in actual rank, and even through… well, _action._

He hardly came close to everything Spyra and the Fallen had achieved on the battlefield, it being more than a little cowing.

Which was odd, because now that he was getting a good look at the latter: he appeared awfully not-muscular…

"Does, uh… anyone else hear that?" Spyra suddenly mumbled.

The shrill outcry of a Dreadwing echoed down the colossal tunnelway over the muted beating of wings. They all glanced upwards as one of the large, bat-like monstrosities passed overhead, far above them and practically straddling the great ceiling of the cave.

That Dreadwing was followed by a flight of no more than seven, the airborne pack of beasts and their riders beelining for the exact same direction they were going. It was interesting to note that Jute's abnormally large steed was _not_ part of that congregation.

"What gives? Why aren't they attacking us?" Spyra gawked.

"Cynder must be consolidating her forces to make another attack." Terradora reasoned. "We should expect another attempt at an ambush."

"The last one was just an _attempt?_" Colcrus swallowed.

"We're alive aren't we?" Spyra cut off her glower look and gave the Ice a smirk.

"They're headed for the same place we are." The Fallen pointed with his gladius to the now distant shapes of the Dreadwings far down the tunnel. They flew past the leaning castle in the backdrop and kept flying for the very end of the catacombs. "Terradora's right."

"It's a good thing we all ate a healthy breakfast this morning…" Ignitia sighed tiredly. She smirked. "_Spyra_ especially. My hungry hatchling indeed."

"Are you saying I'm _fat?_" The purple she-dragon growled like a dog. She yipped when the Fallen smacked her on the haunch loud enough that the clap echoed as he waltzed past her.

"Fat-_assed,_ and that's a good thing." He chuckled. Spyra trailed soot from her nose from the blush.

**_Crsh~! _**

She followed through, and proceeded to nail him in the back of the head with a snowball.

"…No need for such violence, my smexy-beast, you'll scare the children." The Fallen grumbled as he wiped snow out of his hair.

At least this prolonged walk wasn't as cold, only because the blizzard wasn't pissing in their faces with concentrated streams of flurried death.

It was still chilly as hell, nonetheless. The temperature of the mountains in general only paled now that they were going underground and not even a dapple of sunlight was reaching them. The only sources of light were a general loom of blue-gray overtaking the atmosphere and the spaced positions of aqua glowing crystals speckling the cave.

They passed a cluster of Mana Crystals in their natural mounds growing as a bushel in the center of an icy indent. All of the dragons, even the Guardians, took some time to replenish themselves from the trying battle earlier.

"_Deja-vu_ already." Ignitia hummed to Terradora. She stifled a cough and ground it away with a harsh grunt. "I thought I would've been sick of looking at these by the time they let me out of the medical teams' grasp."

"Does the deer tire of the lake's water?" Terradora gave her a slight appraisal in her momentary glance.

"No, I suppose it does not." Ignitia chuckled, sidling a bit closer to her fellow Guardian to nudge their scaly flanks together. Terradora went still as stone and stared at the crystal against her paw with frightening focus. "I missed you, Terra'."

"_Ah-hm._" Terradora cleared her throat, glancing around as she shifted on her hinds and scooted away an inch. "S-Such is observable."

"Do you _ever_ lighten-up?" Spyra blinked at her from the other side of the Mana cluster, her bronze horns peeking around the flank of the jagged, neon green spires. "Babe', I am a complete and utter bitch half the time, and even _I _could pull a more enthusiastic response outta' my ass."

"Terradora practices her daily ritual differently is all." Ignitia quickly interjected. "What _you_ should be focused on, little one, is how you are going to apply yourself to the training courses back at the academy."

"I'm betting those'll be nice and dandy." Spyra groaned, making Ignitia smile humorously. "Ya' know, now that I'm actually out here fighting and whatnot, I seem to be picking up on this elemental stuff on my own super quick. Maybe I don't _need_ the training."

Dulled laughter rumbled in Terradora's sprawling chest. The huge Guardian glanced between the two of them and took her paw from the Mana Gems, the last liquidy bands of magical energy swirling to fruition by her elbow and shoulder.

"She is even more within flame than you were, at her age." She mused, stalking around Ignitia's flank and trotting off. "I cannot deny your talent, young Spyra, but if you are going to become a true Purple Dragon, you will need to deal first with your own naivety, _then_ the refining of your craft."

Spyra's eyes boggled in her head as the Earth Guardian departed, leaving only her and Ignitia.

"…Did she just say she was better than me?" Spyra bore her fangs.

"I believe Terra's point, is that you must take things slowly." Ignitia shook her head, touching Spyra's shoulder with the finned end of her tail. "Nobody saves the world in a day."

"Depends on the size of the world." The Fallen remarked offhandedly as he walked by, sipping one of the party's ration canteens. He stopped and noticed the annoyance Ignitia was skillfully concealing under a fractured, patient smile. "-Oh, uh… if you're both having a moment, I'll just-"

"I ain't having no moment! There's no _moment _happenin'." Spyra fumed, wriggling her talons against the green, reflective surface of the Mana spire. "…._Hmmph. Take it slow she says…. Oh yeah? Well you're chronically constipated, you big earthy-oaf-hen… what do you know anyway… freakin'…._"

Any other grumbles were lost under the beastess' breath.

"How is everything with you?" The Fallen stepped closer to Ignitia.

"I get winded much faster, certainly." She hummed, her other paw opening as she draped her tail in its palm and weighted it to fiddle. "You needn't worry about me, Fallen, I've operated under much much worse and for far longer. Actually, I'm wondering,"

Ignitia nodded to the spanning tundra cave surrounding them.

"-what say you of Chrysalis?"

"…Hm, I say…" The Fallen glanced around with a grin. "It's big, cold, haunting and beautiful all at the same time. I'm assuming that Guardian Cyrila is quite versed on this place's origins."

"Her father and her uncle are buried in the cists here." Ignitia nodded. "I have no intention of letting Cynder bury her here with them."

"Yeah well, hopefully this chick isn't as stuck up as the last one." Spyra glared at Terradora's back as the Earth Guardian stood off on the edges of the exchange, talking lowly with Colcrus standing in front of her. "What is it with Earths anyway? Captain Hamwheel was like this too. It's like these dragons crank up their douchometers to eleven more than the others do."

"I thought his name was Hanlin?" The Fallen blinked at her.

"The Earths are the more militaristic of us." Ignitia admitted. "There has always been an assumption among them that they are the only true barriers keeping away anarchy, that they are the anchor of law and order in the realms. Maybe historically, they were right, but these days… Well, I'll be polite as is needed and say we simply digress on views. We all are equally capable of being brave."

"Uh-huh, just as we're all equally capable of getting yeast infections." Spyra used her hind-paw to scratch at her neck, and then glanced at the Fallen. "_Almost_ all of us."

"We should be moving again soon. Time is of the essence, you know." Ignitia sighed. "…Oh, Cyrila, I'm so… I-I don't know…"

"We'll save her." The Fallen touched her wing.

"I'm gonna' go piss in a snowdrift, be back in a jiff'." Spyra hip-bumped him as she trotted off to take cover behind a boulder patch for privacy.

**_….Fallen…._**

The human's gaze shot past his shoulder to the flank, his ears piqued at the sudden, almost unhearable uttering caught on the air.

**_…Fallen._**

He opened his mouth to address Ignitia, but shut it when he saw the Fire Dragoness was practically chugging one of the canteens off her hipsash. He accusingly sneered at what appeared to be an empty space right beside him.

"What?" Conscience shrugged obliviously. "It wasn't me!"

"Oh yeah? If not you then _who? _Lucifer? The _Converters?_" The Fallen scoffed. "Could I go more than twenty-four hours without you bothering me, you unstable figment of my mind?"

"Hey, I'm not a figment, I take offense to that." Conscience pointed at him. "Who knows? Maybe you've finally cracked and there could be more versions of me to keep you company! Oh, how wonderful! It gets lonely in your skull sometimes."

"_Conscience._" The Fallen clenched a fist.

Or, you know, it could be that black thing by your arm." His other-half angled his chin.

The Fallen's brow furrowed, and he quickly spun around, a hand going for the gladius on his hip.

He froze when he saw the pulsating little arm of hair-thin, undulating black that was hovering in the air right in front of him.

The girth of the projection looked like a gaping wound in the very spacetime and reality in his proximity. It was wholly blacker than night and yet somehow embued with beautiful, and yet still eerie veins of twitching blues and purples.

The levitating hair of magic was impossibly long, and as his eyes swept over the fat little fingertip that it began at, he discovered that the winding, floating worm went out for tens and tens of feet off into the distance. It wound left, right, and vanished around the flank of a particularly large ruined watchtower sticking out of the cragged earth maybe a half kilometer from his position.

**_Fallen,_** the raspy little voice whispered from every direction at once.

A perfumy scent, a familiar one, glanced his nose. The Fallen inhaled and felt his very flesh shudder as he remembered the taste in the back of his tongue.

_Oh shit…_

He glanced back at Ignitia, Terradora and Colcrus, who all were locked in some debate that saw many gestures and tail-points down the massive tunnel in the direction they were heading.

Normally, the Fallen would've stuck himself into such a conversation for intel's sake, but right now, something much less tactical was gripping his attention.

A good gust of cold, subterranean wind moaned overhead as he slipped away from the rest of his party and started moving towards the forlorn ruins nearby.

**_Fallen,_** the ghostly, black fishing line of shadow whispered again. He reached out for it, trying to grasp the little bulb at the end of the string, but the immaterial construct silently slipped back just in time for his fingers to lock around nothing. The shadows bulged for a moment, seemingly from excitement in response to his efforts.

The Fallen grunted and redoubled his steps into a fair jog. The rosy smell was getting more powerful the closer he got to the crumbling castle tower.

When the band of magic vanished around the bend of the tower's base, the Fallen swung past the brickwork, and then froze as he beheld the scene before him.

There was a yawning, crumbling archway that led deeper inside the partially collapsed tower. The magical shadow-rope slipped deftly through the air, and disappeared inside the impenetrable darkness that fleshed out the interior of the structure, banishing itself from his sight.

However, where the visual aid was gone, the scent still remained.

The Fallen caught a waft of the perfume and snorted, his eyes bugging from a sudden onrush of emotions that he didn't quite believe were his own.

He could taste things in this smell, so many different sensations and emotions. The biggest one of all among the variation he couldn't quite place a singular name to.

But it was desperate.

The feeling certainly invoked a degree of starvation for its satisfaction. After a few seconds of taking that in, he had a fair idea then of what it was. But most of all, he had a fair idea of _who_ it was.

The Fallen clenched his jaw and quickly stepped through the arch, plunging himself into a complete, but brief sense of total darkness.

As his eyes adjusted and the temperature ever-so-slightly decreased, the ice-frosted interior of the tower's ground floor revealed itself like a patchwork of detail relented beneath peeling, midnight flesh.

The Fallen glanced all around himself, licking his lips from the vulnerability he had shown simply following the literal lure.

He hadn't thought about it in hindsight.

What if this really _was_ a trap? And the identity of the caster had been a ruse?

With a careful pause, his hand slowly slid over the pommel of his gladius, and his fingers clenched over the supple red grip and slipped the blade out of its sheathe.

"You have me where you wanted me." He croaked aloud into the shadows. "Come out."

With no attempt at concealment, slow, trotting footfalls upon the icy stone floor sounded out behind him. The Fallen turned and looked up at the large shape materializing from the black. A pair of white, glowing eyes stared back at him.

**_Clang~!-rngngng…._**

The gladius clattered onto the ground.

* * *

_**{Legend of Spyro - The Eternal Night OST: Dreams}**_

* * *

"_Fallen…_" Cynder whispered, the band of shadowy magic extending from her body dissipating into nothing as it was reeled back against her crimson breast and burst into a brief dusting of black. "…_There_ you are…"

He went to open his mouth to say something-

A pair of powerful paws clapping over his shoulders stole his breath from him.

The Fallen felt the floor leave his heels as he sailed through the air, and his back roughly hit the mass of one of the archway's buttresses. He grunted, compressing against the ancient brickwork as his legs dangled limply below him.

The large dragon had pinned him to the wall with frightening ease, her powerful forelimbs taught and immovable as the steel-sharp talons on her paws worried his skin even under the pauldrons and leather. A rumble so deep and so reptilian thrummed from Cynder's breast, and for a second it convinced him that an even larger beast of some kind was in the chamber with them.

The black wyrm craned her long neck lower and scrutinized him with her pure white eyes, the tattoos snaking down her forehead and cheeks glowing a vibrant magenta color somewhere between complacent purple and enraged crimson. The rumbling did not cease, and the talons pressing into him started to hurt.

Before the Fallen could voice an objection, the dragoness shattered the anxiousness of the scene, and darted forward.

Cynder bit him across the mouth, cupping the tip of her chops to lock his lips in the tight grip of her muzzle.

Cynder possessed no pupils, but even he could tell that her eyes had rolled back into her head right before she shut them. The rumbling grew to the point that it caused his bones to vibrate. She twisted her long head over and flexed her mandible, undulating their mouths together as an impossibly long, slender and nimble tongue penetrated the space between his lips and flooded into his throat.

The noise she made was something between a gasp of pure relief and an air-starved wheeze. The Fallen might've had some ambiance to add of his own making, however Cynder's tongue ensured that nothing besides the wet reports of slapping lickers and clicking fangs against teeth came out of him.

She gave off a sharp cry into the kiss, and squeezed the life out of him as she compressed her chest into his, squishing him against the wall.

"Well," Conscience strolled past behind Cynder, the Fallen's eyes locking onto him over the desperate dragon's wing. "isn't that just a fine howdy-do?" He laughed.

"-_mMmmmhpph~!_" The Fallen muffled. "_-Mmmhmpp-Hmppp~!_"

"I wish we weren't the same person sometimes," Conscience sighed. "because then all of that would've just sounded like grunting noises, and I wouldn't have really known that you were trying to tell me to go kill myself with a rusty spoon."

The Fallen couldn't have muffled out further rebuking even if he tried. His vision started to go dark and his head felt numb as the oxygen deprivation took its toll.

Just when his eyes started to flutter, Cynder smacked free from him, even with an exaggerated- '_Mwhaaa-_' –to go along with it. The earth-shaking rumble dimmed only slightly in volume, and her cute little breaths hitched out again and again over it. Cynder hummed an almost mournful note and held her forehead tightly against his, panting, her tongue dripping silvery ribbons from their union as it hung limply from her beak.

"-_C-Cynder-_" He barely had time to utter her name before he was flying through the air again.

Cynder crooned and tore herself and the human from the wall. The ground shook as her colossal weight slammed into the tower's flooring. She landed on her back, ensnaring the Fallen like he was a large teddybear in her grip. He made a pathetic choking noise as her limbs wrapped over his back and legs and constricted him suffocatingly into her soft, crimson belly.

The infamous Terror of the Skies had truly shown her colors only hours ago during the lethal ambush in the pass.

Now, she was like an affection-starved cat.

He knew that that crocodilian rumble was in actuality possibly the deepest draconic purr he had ever witnessed. Cynder even went the full mile and craned her long neck down to continuously rub her face over anywhere on him that she could, almost taking his eye out when the sharp tip of her muzzle grazed through his hair, down his cheek, and buried itself in his neck.

She inhaled a huge whiff of his scent and rocked on the stone, her tail cutting circulation off from one of his legs when it strangled his thigh in a constrictive grip.

Normally, the Fallen would've taken any suggestions of being cowed by such advances from a dragoness of all things as heathenry.

Any man of his species unwilling to chance an honorable snu-snu was something less than human.

But he realized sometimes that things like such were easier to say as an outside observer.

He liked being smothered by big, scaly girls.

But he couldn't breathe right now.

At all.

A few muffled cries of panic and a hand slapping her haunch eventually was enough to yank Cynder's head out of the proverbial water.

With an admonished moan, the dragoness slumped to the floor and laid her head back, her gaze locked on the Fallen as he gasped for air.

" –_Gah-~! I- I-…. H-Holy shit, woman, I…._" He stammered, ripping an arm free of her embrace to clutch his chest. "-_I think my life just flashed._"

"_Fallen~._" Cynder purred, dragging him up her breast so that they were face-to-face again. She smiled down the whole length of her muzzle, her tongue snaking out and lapping over his lips. "_My king._"

"-I don't think I could handle the responsibility of rulership, now that I think about it." He tiredly breathed, earning a rising giggle from the large black dragon beneath him. "Hello to you too, by the way."

"Were it not for this moment, I fear something beyond my own desire for the end would have claimed me." Cynder cooed. "Thief of my power, destroyer of my armies, light of my life, I have found you."

Light of her life?

…That was a little dramatic, for his tastes at least.

But looking down at the beaming portals of white that were her eyes, the Fallen could see them yielding to him in an almost perfect display of cherished vulnerability. It was easy to just up and say that Cynder was smitten with him.

Describing the true depth of that conviction, however, was something else entirely on its own level.

"I have not slept through recent evenings thinking about getting you alone with me again." Cynder admitted sheepishly, a deep purple blush working down her snout as she bowed her head to him with a sudden weakness for eye-contact. "-A-And, dare I risk it: I must express that I find myself worth the guilt of fiddling now that I have you in my clutches."

"Not that it's worth wanting any less at all." He reassured her as he sat up on her chest.

Cynder refused to let go of him despite giving him wiggle-room, her paws draping over his hips and lower back. She was still minutely undulating her body into him, enjoying the friction their contact made even if he was still in battle-dress.

"Cynder," He cupped her chin, making the black dragon moan quietly and press into his hand. "listen to me: you have to stop this. You have to release the Guardians."

"…Oh, Fallen, were it that you did not so misunderstand the goal of my actions." Cynder sighed, her tongue snaking out and licking his wrist. "The Guardians are a means to an end. When I am through with my plan, nothing else will matter but you and me."

She didn't process his frown as she devolved into her own fantasies, giggling and kicking at the air with her rear-paws as she flexed her talons on his back.

"I'll have to have _two_ thrones in my castle." She said dreamily. "A throne of artwork, a masterpiece will be carved for my king, and nothing less! Fine carvers and metalworkers from the neutral kingdoms past the west will be the answer. I will seat you upon the greatest artwork ever seen in the Dragon Realms. ….Or…"

She leaned forward and locked him in a brief kiss before smacking free.

"…we could always just _share_ the throne I already have. Maybe, my current one will be yours, and your _lap_ will be _mine._" Cynder's impossibly dexterous tongue glided down her muzzle, and one of her paws cupped over the groin of his breaches. She gave a soft flex of her fingers and squeezed, humming in aroused fascination when she saw him wince. "Does that not sound, ah… pulchritudinous? Oh, bother it not, for it matters not. It is so good to see you."

She purred even louder and possessively squeezed him into her chest, her expression suddenly turning very serious.

"Your little friends outside," Cynder said with a sour grimace. "I highly doubt that they will tolerate your absence for long."

"Cynder, wait a seco-"

"It isn't enough time." She sighed shakily, petting him. "It isn't enough time _at all. _…Fallen, I have never had so many evenings where I felt this alone before. T-The mobilization of the other Ape tribes, the bargain I struck with my Mistress, the war in Oversight…"

"-Bargain? You mean with Malefora?" He sat up on her chest. "What sort of mad bargain did you make that needs you to kidnap Guardians?"

"None of that matters." Cynder swallowed, practically salivating. "My strategy gets us both what we want."

"You know that isn't true as well as I do."

"-_Leave it,_ and be here, now." She paused, her voice dropping so lowly that it only rebounded inside the ancient, frozen tower as a diminished mumble. "…be here with _me…_"

"You're taking what happened at the pass outside very well." He noted offhandedly, drumming his fingers on her scaly flanks.

"…I don't care about the pass." Cynder clicked her tongue with an air of insult, though, it was worth noting the minute tremor in the back of her voice. Oddly enough, that told him more of how it really _did_ impact her more than if she had reacted angrily. "Nothing that has transpired these hours changes what has always been."

"An Ape Chieftain is dead. I peeled his head open like it was a can of peas." The Fallen blinked. "Jute seemed pretty broken up about it, you know, just going off of the tortured howls and whatnot. Besides… Cynder, your armies are going to start coming apart. You can't tell me that you don't see that."

"…Of course I see that." The dragon frowned, her grip on him loosening slightly. "How could I _not_ see something like that? I know that my forces are on the brink of destruction. You and that purple headache have gutted my command structure. Visigoth, now Vandal as well: deceased. Jute's Dreadwings have been nearly annihilated, and the Chieftain himself has been rendered ineffective. I can only imagine the damage Saxony's fleets will suffer in their journey to Monkano for repairs…"

"And as I've said, you don't seem very bothered by all of this." He stroked the bridge of her snout. "Can we stop playing games, and just admit that you've defected?"

"I am-" She stopped, swallowing. "…I am of a position of _neutrality._"

"Neutrality makes you separate from either half, including the one you're supposed to be with."

"Is that really so surprising to you?" Cynder thrummed, her eyes lazily traveling down his chest and stomach. She flexed her forearms against every point of contact with him, whining under her breath when she felt those electric energies of his swimming through her veins. "I joined Malefora because I knew nothing else but pain. I had been her soldier since birth. She taught me how to fight, how to survive, how to utilize Elements none of the dragons had ever used before. She walked me through the process of… of…"

"Cynder?" He held up her chin.

Cynder shrank back from him, and he could feel her body stiffen under his legs as her wings defensively bloomed behind her back, splaying to the floor like she was a crimson angel.

"…She walked me through the process o-of bringing her back." She said in an almost-unhearable utterance. The Fallen blinked.

"Bringing her back." He parroted. "What does that mean?"

"-I-… I d-do not wish to speak of it." Cynder shook her head, attempting to nullify the subject by drowning him in more affections. She lapped at his chin and cupped his shoulders. "I have already suffered one failure today, Fallen, I will not fail in my attempts to find you as well."

"If you had won." He growled, his hands sweeping down her sinuous neck, making her shudder. "If you had actually wiped out everyone else and kept me alive, you know I wouldn't have sided with you."

"…I…" She stumbled, her mouth flapping a few times as the uncertainty of a response overwhelmed her. Cynder swallowed again, and this time, gave her wings a pump, and flipped them around.

The Fallen grunted when his back hit the floor, and the massive dragoness licked her chops as she adjusted her heels and straddled him.

"It matters not. You slew my Chieftain and defeated my forces." Cynder pinned his shoulders, and lowered her mouth until it was hovering just above his. Her minty, draconic breath washed over his lips. "Were you but a lowly champion from the north, I'd have eviscerated you in the most painful ways devisable. Such humiliation earns strict punishment."

"-Y-You can stop the fighting yourself." He swallowed, trying to fight the rising tsunami building up inside his gut. "-The mutations, Cynder, w-we can help you overcome them, prevent Malefora from killing you through them, long enough for the Northerners to find a cure-"

"They would sooner burn their own hatchlings than _help me!_" She shouted in his face, her tattoos suddenly morphing into a daggered crimson. It was easy to say that the outburst was a complete mood-killer. She stared down at him angrily, a snarl sealing her chops. "What do I have to say for you to understand the truth? You are not dense, and you are not dull. A figure of such standing, with such knowledge of war and space-time cannot be!"

"-_Dayum!_" Conscience slapped his knee from where he was sitting on a collapsed palisade nearby, rocking his legs hanging over the side like a child. "That was some compliment she gave you right there! It's hard to believe you'd disagree, but, given our history, I guess I can see why."

"Believe my words when I so single-mindedly tell you: _there is no other way!_" She yelled, bladed tail whistling as it sliced left and right in the air behind her. "The Northerners will never belittle themselves to your suggestions, and as a matter of certain fact, there is a side within me that shant ever wish them to recant such assurances! They _hate_ me, Fallen. And I _hate them!_ Every single one of them should die, in the most painful ways possible! They should all be dead, and so should their families _and_ their children! Their lives are blights, _poxes_ on this land, almost as much as the lives of my cursed _Mistress_ and her Dark Army! I am trapped! _Nobody_ will ever side with me to get me what I want!"

"And what do you want?" He shouted back at her from the floor. "What Malefora wants? You want to kill everything and start over? Is that it? Do you know what that makes you, Cynder? It makes you a _murderer._"

"**_I'm already a murderer~!_**" She screamed, her fist coming down and cracking the very stone flooring by the side of his head. The Fallen didn't even flinch, his gaze fixed on her as he navigated the terrible storm that was now hinging its crux on the dragon's internal war, the one he had so deftly wished to stall. "The blood of hundreds covers my paws, and there is no undoing that! I can't change who I have _been,_ and no part of me shall seek to pursue such pointless quests for as long as I may draw breath. What I want is not _redemption._"

"Than tell me what that something is." He gripped her wrists, earning a growl from her as he forced her back, and sat up, his arms quivering as he battled against her inhuman strength. "So, you don't want what Malefora wants, you don't want what the Northerners want, so then _what_, Cynder? What? _I'm _here with you now, and I'm not going to let you be indecisive anymore. I won't let you stew and rot without choosing a path, and not moving on with your life. Look at me, and tell me what you want."

"-I-I-! I want-!" Cynder became flustered, she tore off of him with such speed and panic, that she hit one of the support beams in the tower's center with a crumbling impact. She shrieked and spun on the inanimate object, seeing it vanish in a burst of flying bricks and dust as her tail scythed the pillar in two and sent it in piles rolling across the frozen floor. "-_aaaAAAGGHH~! I came all this way to find you! And **this**_ _is what you put before me? Questions? Suspicions?! How dare you! You- You insolent little man, you puny particle of flesh, you-! I'll-!_"

"Forget about me, Cynder, you need to _think._" He yelled, jumping to his feet. "Think _hard! _What is it that's the end-goal here? You're still fighting for what you obviously know is the wrong side, and yet you're reacting with indifference when they lose! You still feign loyalty to Malefora, and you still order your Apes around, but you sneak out and risk the wraths of both them _and_ the Northerners by coming to secretly see _me!_"

"W-Why couldn't you just let this go?" Cynder snapped, tears causing little highways of their passage to glisten in the slight ice-light of the tower ruins down her face. "Why couldn't you just take my attentions and _shut up? _Why must you torture me? I, _me,_ am the epitome of beauty in the Dragon Realms. _Look at me and behold!_"

Her wings creaked, and a mighty shadow fell over the much smaller human as Cynder reared back, and stood on her hind-legs, splaying her great, bloody wings out on either side of herself. In that moment, she looked as regal and terrifying as she had during that night in the swamp by the Dragonfly Village.

Poised mid-flight, an angel of black and ruby with the soulless gaze of eternity.

Death on wings, true Terror of the Skies.

Covered in blades, wreathed in shadow and power, bedecked with curvaceousness and the physical lure of a hundred succubi.

Forgetting his prior moments of perhaps jovial reaction, in that moment, the Fallen felt a rare flutter in the very epicenter of his heart that was seldom met by the various creatures and beings he encountered across the Multiverse.

He'd known it all along, but this second was a plain, uncorrupted reminder of the fact:

He _wanted_ Cynder. He had to have her. There would always be a part of his life that would remain incomplete should he continue to exist without her by his side.

"**_Look at me!_**" She screamed, her talons unsheathing as she bore every weapon and pleasantry of flesh she possessed to him. "I am the avatar of strength and unrestrained emotion. I am living sex. I am the Cloud Ripper of the South, Terror of the Skies in the North, the Mistress of Forlorn, Lady of the Concurrent Shadowy Veil and Doom of the Westward! _There are beings in your Multiverse who would forsake everything they knew and cherished to be held by me the way I hold you._"

Her voice became laced with such a conniving, evil hiss that the Fallen wouldn't have recognized her had she not been before his very eyes.

"Too long have I lived a lifeless life of servitude and solitude, and now is the closest I've come, to possessing the one key I've needed to save myself from the eternal night. _How **dare** you question me, as the subject of my heart. I have given up **everything** for you._"

_By your own choice._

-The Fallen didn't speak it aloud.

He knew he couldn't.

For if he did, Cynder _would _have killed him. He was exposed, unarmed, unprepared for a strike from a direction he had so labeled as one of peace. The dragoness could've ended what so many others across the universe had tried and failed to. His life, it was in her claws, and what he said right now teetered on one of the very few times he had ever felt it in true peril.

"I'm not questioning you." He felt numb as he took a staggered step towards the huge, imposing reptile. His blood spiked coldly, and his mouth threatened to stop working. "I'm not refusing you either."

Cynder had started to huff, and her breaths were deep, dragged-out snarls that a much more monstrous organism would've normally made. Her eyes glowed with white, hungry power, and her tattoos were now illuminating the ruins in a sickly tinge of gore-red. She appeared more humanoid and hunched with aggression than he had ever seen of her.

"All I want, Cynder," He said, reaching out to her as he got closer and closer. "is for you to be _free_. And to be free, you need to have a will that isn't corrupted by what others want."

Cynder's huffing started to grow more and more quieted. The dragon twitched when his soft palms carefully slid over her knees and up the sides of her legs. He gazed at her, above him, rubbing her scales.

"I'm trying to save you."

Her face was so twisted. With _hate._ He was getting a real glance into what she looked like during those long evenings of solitude, deep in her castle. Years and years spent scheming, plotting the suffering of others, waging war, all pent up into a single dragon who had never even had the chance to enjoy a childhood. Her face was possessed of such anger, that it appeared almost impossible for anyone to unwind and soothe away.

But slowly, over the course of long moments, that stone exterior started to chip, and flake.

Cynder transformed before his very eyes as all of that malice melted from her. Her jaw quivered, her wings drooped, and her shoulders sagged.

The Cloud Ripper bit herself trying to contain what she knew was an outburst. Wet jewels slipped from her eyes in torrents before she wrenched them shut to stifle the flow. The meekest of highly pitched, mournful whines started to build in volume towards the back of her throat. The tremoring turned into weak, debased quivers.

"-_Ew,_ at least get a tissue. Jesus…" Conscience shifted on his feet beside the Fallen, watching with disgust as tears and probably a few dollops of snot landed on his face and chest. "You didn't have to be standing right under her freakin' face before you poured your heart out like that. Maybe, just maybe, I should stop calling you _manwhore,_ and settle for a nice, biased _Casanova._"

The Fallen glared at him, wiping some dragon-mush off his cheek with a wrist.

Cynder gave off a few pathetic peeps as the buildup rose and rose. Finally, her tattoos sighed quietly as the red slowly seeped from them, and they transformed into a solemn, glum and vibrant _blue._

"Awww, you should hug her." Conscience elbowed him. "You know, I read somewhere one time that giving women physical contact releases the same chemical of love that they get with their own children! Imagine the _desperation-fucking _you could induce with this one!"

"You really are the part of me that is so horrible and stagnant that it should die in a fire." The Fallen blinked at him.

The dragoness finally popped, giving off a mournful, defeated wail that threatened to deafen the poor man.

Before the Fallen could voice protest, Cynder had snatched him off his feet and smashed him into her chest as she reared back and embraced him in a coddle usually meant for a teddybear.

Heaving, deep sobs wrenched her breath from her and stole away any cognitive ability for speech. Her cries and babbling wails were only muted when the she-dragon craned down and used his neck and shoulder to bury her long face. Muffled, hiccupping hums rebounded, even after she fell onto her haunches with a great, thundering bang and rocked with him.

"-_T-There i-is no other w-way-" _She choked. "-_I-I have t-to do-o wh-at I did- w-when I brought her back the f-first time-_"

She stroked the back of his head with her claw, and her crying redoubled, so much so that she refused to even look at him.

"-_I-I have t-to use the C-Convexus- -I have to g-give myself that power- -I-I need it to g-get what I want-_"

She embraced him tighter, her summary wail stifled by his chest.

"-_And I want **you.**_"

"So Cyn', if you want me," He struggled to distance their faces a bit, raising her head with his hands on her chin. "-just join the right god damned side."

"It is as the Cloud Ripper already said: the North would sooner give in to its own destruction than welcome _her_ into its walls."

Cynder tore back from him with a surprised gasp, her horrified gaze turning to one of the arched entryways to the tower.

* * *

_**{The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion OST: Defending the Gate}**_

* * *

Terradora growled ferally and hunched down to her chest, her forepaw scraping against the stone as she worried it like a bull preparing to charge.

"Terradora." The Fallen muttered, sliding out of Cynder's weak forepaws and staggering away from her. "Terradora, _wait._"

"I knew you were a threat the moment I laid eyes on you." The Guardian sneered. "You stank of corruption even from the distance of the Pool. Your motives are of your own, and you are no ally of my people if you treat with abominations such as that _thing._"

"-H-He treats with those of their own accord and will." Cynder sniffled, a canine-esque rumble of challenge rising from her breast as she stood herself up. The Cloud Ripper hunched and spread out her paws and wings, ready to do battle. "I would hardly expect a wretch so blinded by politicking and banging rocks against their head to understand."

"You have always been nothing but an impudent child, Cynder." Terradora shook her head. "And _you,_ Fallen, I care not for your actions against the Dark Army: you endanger us all with this betrayal. After I am through with her, _you_ are next."

"_You will not touch him~!_" Cynder foamed, snapping like a starved lion as she jittered with blinding speed to place herself between Terradora and the Fallen. "_He's mine~! Mine, do you hear me?! **Mine!**_"

"-Damn it, this doesn't have to result in fighting again!" The Fallen sprinted around her, holding a hand up in each dragoness' direction. "You heard her yourself, Terradora, Cynder's on the verge of completely defecting! I realize she's guilty of crimes against your people, but you need to put that aside in the name of stopping a greater threat!"

"_Terra'? _Terra'! What's going on in here? I can hear you shouting from the other side of the-" Ignitia touched down and folded her wings in the archway of the tower, her color draining from her face when her eyes laid on the scene before her. "…O-Oh my god."

"Your champion from the sky is a traitor, Ignitia!" Terradora snapped over her wing. "Look at him! Negotiating with the enemy behind our tails! Perhaps not even negotiations, perhaps simply _scheming._"

Ignitia gazed between Terradora, and Cynder and the Fallen on the other side of the chamber.

"Ignitia," The Fallen stepped forwards, glancing when Terra' inched over to intercept him the moment he tried anything. "-you're one of the most reasonable people I've ever met. I need you to look at this without emotion. I need you to listen to me."

Ignitia opened and closed her mouth, eyes darting back and forth between the two sides again and again. She was frozen, rooted to the spot.

"_Ignitia!_" Terradora barked. "Take their flank and help me corner them! Keep the Fallen off me while I work on the Cloud Ripper!"

"Ignitia," The Fallen shook his head in panic. "you didn't listen to me at Forlorn."

He couldn't tell if that enraged the Guardian or made his answer dawn on her. There was an expression blooming across her face, it was just one he couldn't read. At least, he had gotten her to stop glancing at them all in frozen confusion.

"I do not know what has been going on with all of you, Ignitia, especially with you and the Fallen." Terradora glared at her. "But do not allow your emotions to cloud your heart. You have always done what is right your entire life. Do not stop now."

"_Fallen! _Come back beside me!" Cynder snarled, spreading her wings and flexing her talons into the stone. "We both shall deal with these witches first! Then, you and me are _leaving._"

"_No! _No that is _not_ what is happening, Cynder-! Ignitia-! We-!" The Fallen's face sulked into a stone-fixation of grimness.

Ignitia seemed to deflate with a heavy, sulfurous breath, before she slowly trotted to and around Terradora's flank. She settled by the Earth Guardian's side, positioning her paws, angling her hips, crackling flame building in the back of her mouth.

"_Oh no!_" Conscience hollered nearby, hands clapping on the top of his head. "We can't screw her if we kill her! _Do something, man~!_"

"…I-I am… I am _sorry._" Ignitia hiccupped, bearing her fangs as she started shifting to take an opposite station from Terradora. "I cannot turn my back on my people, or my family. S-Surrender, Fallen, and I will ensure that they do not treat you harshly in Warfang's containment."

"_Surrender,_ pah." Terradora sneered. "I will only claim corpses today."

"W-What are you doing?!" Conscience sprinted closer, eyes wide with horror. "Wait a minute, I'm your other half, I'm supposed to be _in_ the loop not out of it!"

The Fallen glanced down by his flank, taking a step over to stamp his boot's heel down. The gladius chimed sharply as it spiraled off the ground and into the air. He caught it under the pommel and spun it in his fingers, readying his own poise for battle, his back to Cynder.

"Wait, just wait." Conscience jogged in front of him, blocking his view to the two Guardians. It was the first time in a long _long_ time the Fallen had seen his alter-ego appear the way he did, panicked and unsure. "We have to make a choice here. I-I know it's one you don't want to make, but we have to do it. Consider this carefully. Look there and here."

The Fallen obeyed with two sweeps of his gaze.

"Now," Conscience shivered as he sighed. "…are you _sure?_"

"I'm sure." The Fallen croaked, his lower lip threatening to tremble.

"You know that whoever you don't, you'll have to-"

"_Just get out of my way._"

The Fallen walked straight through himself, keeping pace with Cynder as the Cloud Ripper stalked forwards.

True to Terradora's command, Ignitia had taken the suggestion, and was the one angling closer to his front as she made to keep him away from the Earth Guardian's vulnerable sides.

Cynder shrieked and Terradora roared. The Fallen surged forwards right as his opponent leaped.

He drew back his gladius with an embattled bellow, making to aim the blade's sharp point for Ignitia's heart.

* * *

{🐉}


	37. Chapter 36 - Warm as Ice

**Dragon(s)layer**

**36**

* * *

**Warm as Ice**

* * *

**_{Dragon Age Inquisition OST: Dragon Fight}_**

* * *

He watched Ignitia die.

It was very easy to get to such a point with her in this situation. Her guard was weak, and her positioning awkward, all results from truly never anticipating battling her own allies.

The Fallen could sympathize with such a caring spirit. In fact, it was beautiful to witness, humbling too. But ultimately, it was also weak, and foolish, it would've especially been so if she had been a Portaljumper.

So with ease, he did it.

The blade slid right into the wound she had suffered the day prior against the Night Dragons, penetrating the dressing and the already weak, healing scales armoring her coat. The gladius dug deeply enough to sever an artery, and though he had to navigate her frantic slashes and swipes and breaths of fire in her last moments, the Fire Dragoness ultimately succumbed to the weathering destruction her body had suffered. She collapsed, and bled to death, all in one motion evening the odds of the battle, as Cynder and Terradora literally kicked the snot out of one another.

From that point on, as he stood over her lifeless corpse, it was a team of two against one. With his weapons' skills, and Cynder's speed, Terradora didn't stand a chance.

It would've been a victory.

He would've gotten at least _something_ that he had so desperately wanted.

Frankly, something he wanted even more than almost everything else. The one jewel in his collection that he'd never known he'd needed his whole life was in his grasp. There was part of him now that won out, urging him to take Cynder, haul her and Spyra away as the spoils of war, and leave this world to its fate.

But as he stared at Ignitia's opened and dead eyes, he realized just how wrong he would've been to do such a thing.

He also realized that he couldn't let her die.

The Fallen opened his own still very-much-alive-eyes, and the imagined scenario left him in a roaring departure. The wind whistled, and his gladius stabbed downwards, right for Ignitia's shoulder wound.

The Fire Guardian was no weakling, however, and her own counter was incoming to make contact with his head. The sharp fins on the end of her tail whipped forward blindingly fast, her claws were splayed, and her teeth exposed as crackling fire built in the back of her throat.

Nearby, Cynder locked all four limbs with Terradora, and the two mighty dragonesses crashed in a rolling whirlwind of destruction to the ground, taking out pillars and blasting a gash the size of a small house in the ancient brick wall of the tower. Debris flew everywhere, and the chamber briefly became drowned in white smoke.

The mist was just enough for him to take that extra millisecond of consideration.

_There is another way._

Indeed. There _had_ to be. He couldn't let this, _her,_ be ended like that.

Besides, it would've been ridiculous. He and Ignitia had no good reason to harm one another, even with Cynder considered. It wasn't just that there was another way: there shouldn't have been any way _but._

So, the Fallen did what every instinct of his training told him not to do.

He tucked his striking arm, and rolled into his own assault. A half-hearted bolt of fire lazily flung itself to fruition over and past him in an unsuccessful dash for his chest. Ignitia landed from her pounce with a great crash, her powerful limbs and their muscles bundling underneath her ruby scales. The Fallen flipped horizontally, the shining tip of his sword angling, and then traveling over, and over…

-Until it sliced nothing but the air.

The haphazard slash went wide from her vulnerable arm by an atrocious margin. The attack missed.

The human felt the breath leave his chest when he instead struck not with his sword, but with his shoulder, into the dragon's breast summarily after, and any would-be feelings of being a good samaritan were literally slammed out of his skin. Armor clacked against scales. He tumbled onto his face, and Ignitia reeled, coughing hysterically as the blow aggravated her lung.

In an instant, he scrambled onto his feet. Ignitia raised a paw: preparing for a blow that would've pulped a Grublin into the ground.

But just like he had, she hesitated. Neither of them wanted to fight the other.

"_Reminds you of sensei Nasu, doesn't it?!_" Conscience hollered to him. He had to compete with the roar of Terradora and Cynder literally beating the piss out of one another on the opposite front of the battle. Terradora screeched and went to take Cynder's head off with a long sweep of her mace. The blow missed by a scale's length and clipped an ancient pillar in two. Conscience narrowly ducked to avoid an airborne brick from the resultant burst of debris. "_I don't understand, really! You should be getting along with Terradora just fine! She's just as stubborn as any Sangheili ought to be, don't you think?_"

"Was there a point to this?!" The Fallen screamed at him in defiance. Ignitia's prepared stance faltered, and she actually glanced in the direction he was yelling, raising a brow in confusion when nothing but dusty air met her gaze.

"_Yes! Indeed there was!_" Conscience held up a finger victoriously, oblivious as Cynder went airborne as a projectile, a black and red missile that literally missed him by maybe an inch as Terradora chucked her across the foyer. Conscience wiped dust off his breaches before saying: "_I'm supposed to remind you to **do something-!**_"

The Fallen couldn't muster another angry retort, for something hit him in the head, reducing his hearing to nothing but a droning whine.

Deafness was something he'd experienced before, and from much worse in the vast world of weapons. That wasn't the part that bothered him really.

But the _pain._

Oh fucking lord the pain.

He was still bruised from the battle in Oversight's plaza, the draconic medics in the castle and their remedies still fresh and recent. Ignitia wasn't the only one technically walking around as a glass-cannon right now either, so her assault got spectacular results, at least, if she had been someone with the goal of killing him in mind.

He had to yet to see if things had devolved _that_ badly this time around.

Collapsing to a knee, the Fallen grit his teeth and tried to force himself to stand. Ignitia must have hit him with her tail, and by hell did he feel it. That softness he so often experienced when in the literal arms and wings of a dragoness was deceitful. When a wyrm weaponized their own body, they mustered the means with which cities could be leveled. Honestly, it would've been less dangerous if someone had cracked him over the fucking head with a frying pan.

_I can't gauge this girl,_ he realized offhandedly, and completely out of place in the midst of the chaos. _Hot cold, hot cold. She's a Fire, right? Isn't it supposed to be just one and not the other?_

"-F-Fallen, j-just stay down, stay down and-" Ignitia swallowed the stammers, trying to appear imposing as she cautiously advanced forwards, a hunch in her spined back. "-Ancestors, why can't you decide whose side you're on?"

"It isn't _me_ with the identity crisis." He snarled, clutching his aching skull. "-_Agh,_ god damn it, all I did was shoulder-check you, you didn't have to take my frigging head off."

"You left me no choice-"

The ground thundered in a flash of pure white. Ignitia reeled back with a pained hiss as the blinding light forced her to shut her eyes and turn her head away.

In a blast of electricity and sparks, rolling almost as a purple bowling-ball from the smoke came Spyra, and she was barreling right for Ignitia.

_Oh no,_ the Fallen winced, his knees shivering as he recovered his balance, and his hearing started to come back.

"I know exactly what you're thinking: _Not again_." Conscience sighed, shaking his head solemnly. The Fallen felt his lip twitch when his other-half plopped a hand on his shoulder, and patted twice. "Or, what _we're_ thinking? Huh? Ba-dum-_tish~! _I gotchya', and I gotchya' good, you schizo you…"

Spyra pounced onto Ignitia's chest, bouncing off from the impact to separate the two hens by a margin across the battlefield. Soot leaking from her nose, Spyra spat an ember onto the floor and growled.

"Somebody wanna' tell the gal' absentee just what in the everloving _fuck_ is happening?" She snarled.

"-Spyra-! I-! The Fallen-! Terradora-! A-And _Cynder,_ and-!" Ignitia stammered.

"_The Fallen is a traitor!_" Terradora hollered, pinned underneath Cynder as the two massive 'nesses finished rolling through the rubble. Cynder straddled her, trying to pry apart her forepaws so she could snap at Terra's face with her beak.

"_The Fallen is mine!_" Cynder was foaming at the mouth, making even Spyra pause as she took in the albeit disturbing scene. "_Minemineminemine**MINEMIN-**_"

A blast of cold Mana whipped across the crumbling foyer, and Cynder flailed off of Terradora's chest, her head frozen near solid in yet another entrapping wad of blocky ice. The impact had sounded like a tin can being wrapped off the side of a dumpster, the Fallen realized.

"God damn it, that bitch needs a fuckin' pill or something." Spyra guffawed, giving her bronze wings a testy flap. Her angry gaze swept to and fro, and again that growl started to rev up in her chest. The fighting ceased, and for the first time since the Guardians had arrived, the lonely tower was again plunged into relative silence. "Soooooo…." She trailed. "-ya'll seem to have been _busy_. Can't a 'ness take a piss with some expectation of everything being the same as she left it a minute ago?! _Huh?!_"

"I-! We-! They-!" Ignitia clamped her jaws shut and shook her head. "-_Gah~! _You know what? I _concur._ Fully and absolutely! What in the Ancestors' great names are we _doing?!_"

"Saving the Dragon Realms," Terradora spat dust from her mouth, rolling out of the rubble to stand herself up on trembling knees. Her lacerations and cuts wept trails of ruby as she shook herself like a dog, glaring at the human in particular. "and weeding out the agents of the enemy."

"_This_ again?" Spyra clicked her tongue, frowning when a nearby pile of debris shifted aside, and the black, lithe form of Cynder plopped onto her belly from the content's center. "Ah, no wonder, a wild _skank_ crawled in through the doggy-door while I was away. Figures…"

Cynder gasped as the ice block finished melting off of her face, and for a moment, the two rivals stared one another down across the few feet dividing them in the now dust-invaded foyer of the tower.

It was almost comical, watching Cynder peel herself off the floor, trying and failing to maintain some semblance of her twisted sense of superior etiquette. Spyra could read all the signs like open book pages nailed to the wall. The tremors wracking Cynder's legs, the flush running down her snout and the scales on her black hips, how her wings preened out with unneeded rapture…

Well, at least it wasn't just her who had an addiction to human-flavored sausage. For some reason, that was oddly reassuring.

"I'm _not_ a traitor to the dragons of Warfang." The Fallen's voice echoed, his steps struggled as he placed himself in the center of the group. He grumbled as the splitting headache pulsed inside his skull, ravaging him with hot stakes right to the brain. "The only traitor here is _her._"

Cynder looked flabbergasted as the human pointed a finger directly at her. The rage was seeping out of her system, replaced with a solid mass of almost shy misunderstanding.

"…_I…_" She quietly whispered, her breath hoarse from all the fighting. She stumbled over some bricks in the debris as she took a step backwards. "…_w-what…?_"

"She's betrayed Malefora." The Fallen reiterated. "Cynder is defecting."

"_Lies._" Terradora snarled. "The Terror of the Skies has served as a loyal servant to the Dark Master since her conception. She is pure evil, you impudent little mongrel."

"She's a fucking mess, you single-minded, uninspired and frankly misandristic bitch." The Fallen snapped. Ignitia's jaw dropped, and Spyra's eyes bugged out. "She could be the only ticket you have to finally ending a thousand years of warfare, and you just cannot bring yourself to look at this in any other way except _your_ way. It's all _your_ way, _your_ strategy, _your_ rights and wrongs, Terradora. You really have blinded yourself over the years, isolating yourself from your only family, chasing a career in the military to run away from a life of baseless waste and misused time. The monk who tries to be the soldier always ends up less than _both._ You want to call _me_ impudent? Look in the mirror. God damn you all, you _all_ need to look in the mirror! We showed up here as an allied party, and now we're at each other's throats!"

"_Ohh~…_" Ignitia tilted her head back with an exhausted, ghostly sigh. "-_Again._"

"Ah-ha, so I'm not the only one scratching my head. Jesus, you people are shallow when it comes to military alliances. You're worse than the damned Kroot…" The Fallen ranted under his breath.

"Well, technically, ole' boulder-chucker over there and Ignitia _did_ walk in on your latest tryst with Cunterella." Spyra wing-shrugged. "Call me the more acceptin' chick with the eccentric lifestyle, but methinks the last _lifetime_ of attempts from the Gothic fuckface to kill them and their friends have left a pretty bad impression."

"If only you could speak with some conviction of prior knowledge to it." Cynder muttered, spitting dirt from her mouth and wiping her muzzle off on one of her silvery wrist-cuffs. "I bet you look at the She-Wench of Mud and the Pyromaniac as free of sin, and destined for martyrism should worst come to pass."

"I've only known these people for like a month, honey, we still got time before I have more than just hunches and shit to go off of." Spyra frowned. "Actually, all that flippin' time hasn't given me this kind of proof yet. So it _is_ true that you and my boi-toi' are a thing…"

Right after Spyra said that, all the eyes in the chamber (even Cynder's) went over to see Terradora's expectedly violent reaction to such news.

But strangely, the Earth Guardian said and did nothing. She was staring at the Fallen, eyes big, glassy, and wide, a deep-set and toothy frown clenched all down her muzzle, to the point where it looked as if she was trying to grind through her own molars.

The Fallen's commentary must have struck a chord. Or, quite possibly, Terradora was shell shocked at having someone back-talk her without fear of having their head ripped off for the first time in her life. What did the master tactician do when they were attacked in the one way, shape or form they never expected?

"_Hmmph,_ well, at least I drive him mad with my feminine form. I have waited a lifetime to find the true mate who could claim my regal heart, and so be it, I have found him." Cynder harrumphed. "He is putty in my paws, you stupid little hatchling. You never had a chance in terms of mating rights against a more dominant and mature hen such as myself."

"_Oh-ho,_ now there's a statement from the fuckin' peanut-gallery, eh?" Spyra whirled around, furious. "Yeah, bitch? You think you can play that flute? I _own_ that flute, ya' hear? _Own it, sista'._ And there ain't a tune it can make that I haven't squeezed out with these ole' hips of mine."

"_OOoohhheeeewww, I'm getting images-!_" Conscience mock-gagged beside the Fallen. When the latter glared, he dropped the façade like a hot-coal and chuckled. "Nah, just kidding. I had those images even if she didn't say anything. Hard to believe, even with all this going on: it's _still_ giving you a slight boner right now." He pointed at the Fallen's crotch.

The human tisked and self-consciously sifted the hilt of his sword-hand over to cover his groin.

It wasn't _that_ bad.

Damn it.

It was more like… _minimal,_ and such. Maybe, like, thirty-seven per-cent of a boner, but still…

"Besides, tattoo-ass, you should be thanking me." Spyra added caustically, her gaze once again darting between every dragon there, and then the Fallen. "It's takin' a whole lot of restraint to sit back and hear all of you out. A _whole lot._ So start talking, whoever has to, and do it quick, or I'll break my foot off in your ass and pluck out your eyes with a spoon."

"…It is difficult for us, for _me,_ you must understand." Ignitia spoke aloud when no one else said anything. "Cynder has been warring against my people for the last twenty-five years, and she has killed many, some even whom I knew personally. To so suddenly accept her capitulation, to suggest that I stand by her side and…"

"I never _asked_ to stand by your side." Cynder hissed. "It was nothing personal, Guardian, whomever of my list of felled foes you speak of and their demise. We're all just doing our jobs, after all."

"You say that as if that's an excuse!" Ignitia flushed. "Murderer!"

"No, you never did ask, _I _asked for you." The Fallen interjected, nodding for Cynder, and then Ignitia. "And you have every right to be hateful, and to want justice, but I'm telling you right now that Malefora is the bigger threat. We can stop her with Cynder's help."

"That's news to me." Spyra creased her chops. "She's been doing nothing but trying to kill us or sending other people to try and kill us the whole time."

"You mentioned a deal." The Fallen turned to Cynder. "Right?"

"A _deal? _With whom and for what purpose?" Ignitia scoffed. "Fallen, Cynder has manipulated others for her entire life, she's lied to you!"

"The deal with my Mistress was never for anyone but you and _me._" Cynder bowed her head, eyes glistening as she stared at the human's boots. "If you wish to claim that it benefits these Northerners, then I am of the opinion that it is within your right. I simply need their Elemental Mana, not their cooperation."

"Wait…" Spyra trailed.

"Elemental Mana." Ignitia parroted. "You mean, from all four of the Guardians?"

"…I have said too much already." Cynder sneered, glancing at Terradora (still unmoved from her spot) and beginning to back away. "Mark my words, my king, we _will_ be one, and soon."

"You seek to open the Convexus." Ignitia breathed.

"What the hell is a Convexus?" Spyra blinked. "It sounds like a skin disease."

"The Portal to the Realm of Convexity." Terradora blurted, her normal features of set stone breaking through her stupor. "You are out of your mind, Cynder."

"_No,_ no, Cynder you can't!" Ignitia gasped. "It was different when you opened it the first time, it was merely a barrier for Malefora, but now-"

"_Silence!_" Cynder shrieked. "It is the only way! _Absolution! _There is no answer otherwise that brings to me the sole purpose of my war! I will have the life I was denied. I _will_ be the Queen of Concurrent, and I _will_ have my King!"

"I don't understand." The Fallen tried to move closer to her. "What is the Convexus, Cynder? What happens if you open it? Again?"

"You will see." Cynder said mournfully. "You will see very very soon."

The black dragon vanished in a burst of Shadow-smog.

Well then, that was that.

* * *

**_{Legend of Spyro The Movie OST: Prelude to a Dream}_**

* * *

"_Convexus._" Ignitia moaned, gripping her snout and squeezing as she fell onto her haunches. "Oh Ancestors, not _Convexus…_"

"Do I really have to ask?" Spyra took her eyes off of where Cynder had vanished from, giving them a roll.

"It is the gateway to the reality known as Convexity, source of Shadow and all elements and organisms related to it." Terradora robotically muttered. "Long ago, the Four Guardians before me and Ignitia imprisoned Malefora's physical form there, to prevent her from leading her armies personally during the battles."

"Scarla did that, as did Litnari, Crysicos and Uungor." Ignitia huffed. "The Four Guardians of the prior age. Malefora was trapped inside Convexity for years before her Apes destroyed the Dragon Temple, absconded with Cynder's egg, and mutated her into the Cloud Ripper. Malefora used her to open the Portal of Convexus, deep in the Iron Wastes. Me and the other Guardians were unable to stop her."

"…So," The Fallen struggled to take it all in at once. "…So if Cynder opens the Convexus gateway again, what happens? What's the point?"

"It's like releasing the latches of a floodgate." Ignitia shook her head. "All of that Shadow energy will be allowed to funnel into our reality, it will literally drown the Dragon Realms in pure darkness, and it will most likely empower any dark creatures it touches, to such godly extents that I can't even fathom."

"Malefora will get all hopped-up on portal-drugs, and she'll kick our cans." Spyra simplified. "And so will Cynder, she'll become even more powerful."

"It's why Malefora never leaves the volcano on the Dark Continent, she's been too weak ever since the Convexus sapped away the majority of her power." Ignitia stood up. "There's no telling what will happen if Cynder opens the gateway a second time. She needs Mana from all four Elements in order to activate the crystal in the portal's frame, it's the only key to the ancient spell-locks placed there by the original makers of the Convexus."

"And who were they?" The Fallen asked.

"All of the dead things that tried to eat us the last time me and my sisters journeyed to the Wastes." Terradora grumbled, picking at one of the cuts on her shoulder. "The Trolls. They tried to control Shadow once, to use in a great civil war, so they built the Convexus on top of a massive spire. The portal opened, and their civilization was wiped out, and then buried under the snow from an unceasing blizzard."

"We need to rescue Cyrila and get whatever item that Cynder is using to harvest her Mana." Ignitia explained. "We've already wasted too much time."

"Indeed." Terradora glared daggers at the Fallen, harboring something unspoken as she yanked herself clear of the debris littering the tower.

"Oh great, _more_ chores on the frikken' list, sign me up…" Spyra huffed impatiently. "-By the way, now that kick-ass-theater has run its course: where's that Cold-Crust guy, or whatever the hell his name was who came with us from the castle? I haven't seen him."

"He must be looking for us." Ignitia sighed.

"Maybe." The Fallen stepped up to her, making an effort to brush some dirt off her breast. He gripped her scaly shoulder and limped around the Guardian's flank. "I'm not giving up on Cynder, but I'm also not letting her open that portal. Let's get Cyrila and get the hell out of these mountains."

Spyra fell into step beside him without question, and it took a moment for Ignitia to slowly follow.

"I apologize for threatening to arrest you. _Again._" She uttered.

"Sorry for shoulder-checking you." The Fallen said lowly.

"It was certainly better than the alternative." Ignitia shyly smiled, nodding for his sword.

"Yeah, I think we've all smacked each other around enough." Spyra chimed.

"You actually deescalated a fight." The Fallen smiled at her, earning a flushed snout and a modest- '_pah' –_from the purple heroine. "You should be proud of yourself."

"Well, high talk indeed from the cause of the matter." Ignitia sounded embarrassed, even though it was a shot at someone other than herself. She craned a suspicious eye on the human when he failed to respond. "If you weren't helping us get so much done, things would be much different. This is now the second time where you've caused members of our group to trade blows."

"Neither of which were intended." He grumbled.

"Regardless."

"You're right, but saying sorry only means so much." Suddenly, the Fallen stopped, and he twisted around to look behind the three of them. Ignitia followed his eyes.

Terradora remained still in the center of the wrecked foyer, eyes narrowed, her attention affixed to the floor. Ignitia thought her wings appeared to be wilted, like thirsty flowers, and wholly the image of almost beaten sheepishness was not at all the right fit for the Earth Guardian's image.

"Terra'?" She called. "Are you injured?"

Terradora blinked, like she had woken from sleep, gawking at the party for a second before clumsily following after them. She paced while she walked, interestingly enough, her tail acting like a rudder as she swerved in her own path.

"I'll say sorry to you too, but I think I already know what you have to say to that." The Fallen said.

"If so, then why bring it up?" Terradora grunted. "You are nothing but disrespectful and childish, and you cannot make up your mind."

"I'll take that over you trying to kill me again." He faced her fully, despite Ignitia trying to stop him with a wing in his path. He delicately nudged it aside and stood to eye-level (or as best as his shorter form could manage) with Terradora. "I have no interest in fighting you or your allies, Terradora. I'm on your side, and I've made up my mind. But Cynder is a victim of Malefora's actions too. I've colluded with her because she can help bring down Malefora faster."

"_Pfffyeah,_ you _colluded _with her alright." Spyra clicked her tongue. "How's that strategy of yours workin' now that you know what she's trying to do?"

"It _should_ prove your ignorance." Terradora stared him down coldly. The looks emanating from the two of them were exactly alike: hardened, unflinching. The Fallen _loved_ it when people who had seen shit thought that they had an advantage of wisdom over him. He had news, and it wasn't so simple a victory, especially for Terra'. "But I believe I know what _you_ have to say to that."

"You're taking this well." Ignitia nudged their snouts together.

"I am not." Terradora shook her head. "But as much as I hate to admit it, the Fallen is right. I reacted… _brashly._ I should have attempted dialogue and for that, I have failed you."

"Oh, Terra', you didn't fail me or anyone else."

"We can talk more about this later." The Fallen nodded. "And I think I would enjoy that from a less confrontational angle, for the sake of it, right?"

"For the sake of it." Terradora grunted.

* * *

{🐉}

"-_You'll never break my spirit, Ape-scum! Warfang will emerge victorio- ACK~!_"

"_Shut yer gob!_" –The Ape officer made an extra effort to twist his grubby fingers as he stuffed a wad of cloth down Colcrus' throat. "Aight lads, lift em up there. It's roastin' time it is!"

"These people are fucked up." Spyra mumbled commentary as the party hid in the shadows of a ridge nearby.

"They are _disgusting._" Ignitia hissed, watching as a team of Apes hoisted Colcrus off the ground.

He was tethered to a long pole back-first, tight bonds of rope sealing his limbs, tail and wings completely. The Apes plucked the pole on two prong-timbers on either side of a roaring bonfire. A cavalcade of their fellows who had gathered around the flames whooped and hollered as Colcrus' panicked mewls muffled out. Several of them were slobbering, and one or two were even swinging around barbed eating forks impatiently. Someone started screaming when a stray fork ended up in their eye. Apes were unconcerned with safety as much as they were absent of coordination.

"Spyra and I can take right down the center." The Fallen touched Ignitia's wing as he started to rise from the ground. The campsite sprawled below and ahead of them in an icy depression, it being the ruined remains of a castle tower surrounded by a cluster of tents fashioned from animal furs. He pointed to the side of the terrain. "You and Terradora flank them."

"At least get some garnishes and potatoes." Spyra stuck her tongue out, giggling when Ignitia gave her a horrified look. "_Kidding! _I'm just kidding. Nah, c'mon guys, let's go save the annoying stooge that I didn't want to come with us. I was right though, eh? Check it: fairy-boy can't even fight."

"At least he is genuine in his intent." Ignitia shook her head. She glanced over her wing to look at the back of the ridge. "Terra'? Are you ready?"

"Indeed."

Indeed indeed _indeed._

It was literally the only word Terradora had been using since the incident with Cynder. She was constantly somewhere else in her thoughts, eyes glazed, locked onto distant horizons, or occasionally the Fallen's back. They were always a bit more daggered whenever the latter happened. Ignitia knew something was stirring in her battle-sister's mind, but she doubted it would come to light until _after_ they got Cyrila and went home.

"No surprises this time: do you see anything?" The Fallen nudged Spyra as he fixed his skirt-mail.

The purple dragon's eyes swept over the scene, trying to not focus on the cluster of Apes as they danced around the bonfire Colcrus was in peril of being cooked by. Unsurprisingly, she picked out a pair of Dreadwings, absent of their riders, squabbling on the edge of the camp over some unidentifiable morsel from a past meal, it looked like a chunk of an elk's leg. Aside from that, nothing on the horizon, nothing to the west, east, or the ceiling-

-wait.

Spyra did a double-take of the cavern's high-risen roofing. There, among the clusters of icicles and jagged points was something anomalous.

A hole. A literal breach in the stone that showed forth beams of dim, gray daylight through its mass to dapple to some distant point below inside the tunnelway. When Spyra followed the trajectory of the beams, her heart skipped a beat.

"-F-Fallen?"

"Yeah? Did you find something?" He smirked at her.

Spyra gulped. She reached over and cupped his chin, turning his head for him to look where she was looking.

The Fallen blinked, and then he began to quiver.

"I'm going around them." He stated.

"_What?_ That wasn't the original plan." Ignitia gawked. "What in the world would you go around them for? They'll just attack your rear flank."

"Have Terradora flank while you and Spyra get their attention." The Fallen jumped onto his feet before any of the dragons could voice further protest. "Hold them off until I'm done."

"Done with what-?!" Ignitia squawked.

"_I'll be right back~!_" –He hollered, already halfway down the ridge.

"That little shit." Terradora grumbled. "I wish his strategies were inept, so I did not agree with them. I have the flank."

* * *

**_{The Hobbit OST: Warg Scouts}_**

* * *

"Got it, Terra'. You're with me, Spyra." Ignitia grunted as Ape's hooted and barked in surprise. She and Spyra leaped over the ridge's lip and started down the incline. Behind them, Terradora took to the wing and started curving from the west. "Where exactly is the Fallen going this time? It isn't Cynder again, is it?"

"Fat chance." Spyra shot her a snarky grin. "But I still just gotta' see this for myself."

What were the odds? Probably pretty good, seeing as half this little adventure had been planned out from the start by powers the Fallen could not counter at the moment.

He took the lighter flank of the mob as he sprinted between the tents and a dynamite-dump, slashing aside a handful of Apes who tried to get in his way. His eyes were fixed on the terrain past the camp's northern fringes. Where the pillars of light from the breach in the roof were showing, wedged in the great rocks, there was something of high value.

An Ape wielding an axe embroiled in magical flame bellowed in rage as he charged. The Fallen ducked under the Commander's swing and ran him through the armpit, twisting and ripping free as a cascading ribbon of arterial gore spattered the snow.

In the center of the campsite, Colcrus was wriggling like a tortured earthworm under the rope, his confused eyes following the human as he completely bypassed him and went on his way, rampaging through the Apes trying to stop him.

_Where are you going?! What about me?! _–The look said.

_You'll be fine,_ the Fallen would've told him dismissively. What were some third-degree burns in the name of survival anyway?

He slashed an Ape's face open and kicked it off the side of an iced rock shelf. The terrain here buckled downwards further into a depression. A trench centered the little valley surrounded by cracked ridges and expanses of solid stone encrusted in rime. The massive maw in the earth dropped so deeply that it was pure black at the bottom. It was easily the size of a small castle, and the Fallen snarled in anger when he realized he'd have to fight his way completely around it.

_Looked closer from the ridge,_ he noted, hopping down steppes of ice-plats, one surface at a time, his boots crunching heavily with each landing.

Behind him, the Apes shuffled down in pursuit, their breath misting underneath their brutish helmets as they stabbed the air with axes and cleavers and threatened him with angry shrieks.

One of the Apes became overeager and leaped over a ten-foot drop. He bodily collided with the Fallen at the summit, and the two of them rolled painfully down some of the plat arrays.

They landed in a splash of snow, the Ape hooting and trying to grapple with his arms. The Fallen roared and flipped their bodies around by weighing in with his knees. He punched the Ape between the eyes, held down his snout with his elbow and fore, and then grabbed his jaw with the other hand before yanking upwards and ripping it free of his head with a wet tearing sound.

Blood spurted over the Fallen's leather vesting. He sneered and killed the gagging Ape by slicing open his throat. He vaulted over the corpse and redoubled his journey downwards.

Ice cracked and stone crumbled. A throwing axe lodged blade-first suddenly appeared by the Fallen's foot as he landed down the next steppe. More hurled axes smacked off the rocks and ice in far misses. The Fallen scooped up one of the weapons as he sprinted to the other end of the plat, pausing at the ridgeline to aim palm-wise and throw it at the first Ape to reach his level down the cliff.

The axe gave off a whir-like _whm whm WHM-! _–sound, before it cracked to the hilt through an Ape's forehead and bisected his cranium. The casualty was trampled by his fellows, and the Fallen further retreated.

He could've stayed and fought the whole mob, and he probably would've won, even if Spyra and the Guardians couldn't reach him to offer support.

But the prize on the other side of this damnable trench was more valuable than any sort of pride of his.

The drop was perilous, his heart froze when he slipped on a patch of black ice, scrambling on the very edge of a gargantuan fall into the darkness below. There was a pathway of steppes skirting the trench's flank. He started to follow it, hiking, hopping, jumping up and down varying plat heights. The Apes were relentless, and being Vandal's boys, they were mountain-folk before they were Cynder's soldiers. They lived in this kind of terrain and could trek it better than he could.

He was halfway across the skirt when a cluster of Apes began to catch up to him. The Fallen panicked and tried to jump over a fissure dividing two of the ice plats. His heels hit the edge and slipped backward, nearly torpedoing him down and over the edge to his death.

"-_Agh~!_" –Ice crunched as his gauntlet found purchase. His arm flared in agony as all his weight yanked down on his joints. Three limbs and his torso dangled over the edge. His fingers were trembling as his grip weakened, and the window of hope closed more and more.

_Shit._

The mob of Apes skidded to a collective halt on the side he had come from. One of them stopped too late, and for a moment, he wavered to and fro on the edge of the drop with his arms windmilling for balance. Another Ape slipped on the ice and shouldered him in the back, sending the shrieking grunt tumbling down into the black pits of the trench.

The Fallen swallowed as he craned over to watch the doomed Ape descend. When it was swallowed by the shadows and its screams echoed to nothingness, the Fallen could feel a leaden pit begin to build in his stomach.

"That's the _hooman_ everyone's gettin all riled bout?" A bulky officer snarled. He reached over and ripped an axe out of one of his men's paws. "Gimme dat. Now, watch dis, boys."

The Fallen's eyes bugged when he saw the officer lean his axe-arm back for a throw.

"_Turn im inta a pin-cushion!_" Someone barked. The axe flipped through the air and out of the officer's grip, aimed for the center of the Fallen's back right between his shoulders.

The human snarled and reached up with his other hand. He held on as tightly as possible, and he swung his legs to the side, trying to mimic the weight of a pendulum.

It wasn't enough, the axe still embedded into the back of his leather cuirass with a sharp _crack! _–and before the Fallen knew it, he was screaming as white-hot pain shot up through his flesh and into his neck.

The axe slipped out of the incision it had made, and tumbled, its blade glistened with blood, into the blackness below. The Fallen slumped as he felt warm liquid running down and pooling into the lower center of his back. The cut wasn't that deep, but _hell_ did it hurt.

A blast of snowy smoke suddenly was born right in the center of the steppe that the Apes had gathered on. They flew in droves over the edges and down into the trench cliffs, screaming and shrieking.

It was Terradora who appeared out of the smog, her mace-tail swinging left and right and shattering the bones of every Ape she hit.

"_This changes nothing!_" She called matter-of-factly to him over the chaos.

An Ape Commander as tall as she was hit her across the face with a studded maul. Terradora reeled from the hit, globules of saliva and blood flinging from the tip of her snout. The Commander hollered a deep, and ragged cry of challenge, spittle clinging to the tusks jutting out from his lower jaw. Terradora's responding roar was deafening, reptilian, and it even reverberated towards the end, like some kind of alien call from a gigantic bird. She opened her maw, and the Commander shrieked as her jaws closed over the entire space centering his broad shoulders.

Terradora literally bit his head off with a wrenching twist. Flesh tore, bones cracked and decorative tusks on the Commander's cuirass crumbled. She ripped away and let the decapitated corpse tumble. The dragon leaned over the ridge and gave a disgusted- _'p-too~!_' –sending the rolling head flipping down to eternity.

"You owe her one now." Conscience chuckled, kneeling, watching as the Fallen clawed his way up from the cliff. "You do have to admit: that was pretty badass what she did with the shag-rug's head there."

"_Shut up!_" The Fallen barked, wincing as the pain in his back flared. "_Come on! Come on, damn you!_"

It wasn't far now. He sprinted- suffering the whole way –between crags sticking from the tortured landscape, and delved between the fang-like arches of a long collapsed artificial gateway.

The beams of light culminated from above in the center of a bowl-shaped wound in the ground. It was the size of a barn, roughly, and sheets of glistening glass- weeks old –crunched under his heels as he jumped over the rim and landed in the crater's edge. The cries of the Apes and the sounds of the melee were distant. As the Fallen stood up, a warm, flowing sense of something he had felt in a long time swelled up inside him, and it wasn't the blood on his back.

_Relief,_ he breathed, stepping closer to the crater's heart through the crinkling glass sheets. _Sweet gods, relief._

The orb was quite large, not as large as the one he had come down in, but large nonetheless. Its lead-colored surface glistened from the gray beams shining down on it in an almost heavenly presentation. The ground was black around the very epicenter of where it had impacted.

Just to make sure it was real, when the Fallen stumbled within arm's reach of it, he clasped his hands across the metallic flank of the pod. It rung hollowly from the contact, and the cold, alien metal stung against his palms even through the gloves of his gauntlets. It had been sitting in this cavern for so long that the material had frozen over. There were patches of rime soiling the normally pristine and satisfying roundness of the pod. The Fallen could've cried as he wiped some of the icy dust away and watched the particles float down in the air like a million tiny, falling leaves.

"It took you long enough." Conscience sighed by his flank, his own hand patting the pod's cold flesh. "If it's all in one piece, you know, you _can_ technically leave. And you can leave with both of them."

The Fallen chuckled as he searched for the proper rune.

"No I can't."

"It's debatable if they would willingly do it." Conscience allowed. "Probably only with Spyra, though, does that apply. Cynder would be all for it in a heartbeat. But then again, there's the mutations…"

"Conscience, you're many horrible, stupid things," The Fallen grinned when the pod hissed, and ice cracked as a portion of the rounded flank started to lift from the porcelain-smooth metal. "an excuse-maker is not one of them. We have to stay here, for now."

"I am actually quite glad to hear you say that."

He would've looked at his other half, but he was too preoccupied with the pod.

The moment the hatch lifted, the Fallen threw himself forwards, delving into the curiously ozone-scented interior of the pod's guts. Metal rung against his knees, and his cut bled, but he didn't care. He was too excited, too overjoyed.

In the darkness sat a small bundle of metallic items. The Fallen reached out for them without even thinking. His fingertips brushed the plating, and then-

"-_Ack-!_" –The Fallen's breath was squeezed out of him. Something had entrapped his torso, snaring it and compressing it with a colossal force that he could not overpower.

When he looked down, he expected to see something like a serpent, or a giant line of rope.

His eyes bugged when he saw that it was neither of those things, but a set of four, jagged and giant _fingers._

Fingers made of semi-translucent ice.

* * *

**_{The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim OST: Combat #5}_**

* * *

With a defiant cry, he was yanked from inside the pod and tossed across the crater. The Fallen hacked as his wounded back slammed into the cold soil and he slid down onto his rear. Looking up, the human gasped when a hunched, imposing _thing_ rose from a crunched squat, like a gigantic child would stoop down to get at an insect hiding beneath a piece of furniture.

In similar adolescent interest, the creature released a groan that sounded like a glacier shifting across a sea of rock, and slowly craned around to focus its attention on him. It had no eyes, nor a discernable head. Its torso was blocky, and its left arm was much more massive than the right, adorned with a huge wad of jagged ice for a shoulder, and layered down with sections of solid crystal that ended in a maul-shaped fist.

The ice-creature groaned again and took a thundering step towards him, evidently intent on finishing the job.

"Huh." Conscience offered a hand, but the Fallen swatted it away with an agitated growl. "I didn't think this place had Golems."

"It has magic, doesn't it?" The Fallen clenched his fists as he watched the huge monster stomping closer and closer. "…_Oivey'_."

"Better get your Speedy-Gonzales on, hombre'!" Conscience grit his teeth as the Ice Golem raised its bulbous, armored fist, descending them both into a dark shadow. "It's definitely a cold day in hell!"

The Fallen cried out and threw himself forwards, the ground he had been standing on vanishing in a plume of smoke as the Golem brought its fist down.

The creature groaned and tried to lean lower to peer between its legs as the Fallen scrambled to his feet and started beelining for the pod again. His sword was useless here, and he could only dodge so much. If the Golem caught him with an attack like that, he'd be a portaljumping pancake and nothing more.

_Not really a satisfying career path._

The Golem swung around with surprising speed, using its larger arm like a scythe as it swiped it across the air. The thumb hit him in the side, and the Fallen barked as he was lifted off the ground, going airborne in a complete loop before landing.

**_Crack~!_**

-_Oh shit. _

He didn't feel the pain yet, but that _snap_ of something that was supposed to be moving now moving in his chest was signal enough that the landing was really bad. He rolled onto his chest and got up.

_Need the pod. Need the pod. Come on._

An icy foot slammed into the ground, blocking his path.

The Fallen gawked in horror as a _second_ Ice Golem finished stepping over him and the ridge of the crater, and formally stood itself up right beside the other one. Each monster was almost fifteen feet tall, and reams of tiny ice-dust fell from their roughened joints each time they moved.

Both Golems turned to face him, and started stomping closer, spreading out so that he couldn't dart around them.

Where was Spyra or one of the Guardians when you needed them? Maybe there had been more Apes back there than they had initially thought there were, because he was on his own out here entirely. He couldn't stop these things.

_I've come too far to get squashed by some ice-sculptures gone awry ten feet from that pod,_ he thought angrily. One of the Golems raised a foot to stomp on him, like he was a bug. The Fallen winced as his body flared in yet more pain.

_This is going to hurt._

When the heel fell, the Fallen roared and threw himself forwards again. Whatever was broken in his torso stabbed him with a red-hot flare of burning agony, and cuts he'd sustained from the scuffle earlier and the Apes bled just a bit more.

He hit the ground at the same time as the Golem's heel. A mighty crash shielded the little _pa-dunf _–of his body hitting the dirt. The Golems were blinded by their own girth, angling their faceless bodies about to try and locate him in the resultant confusion. The Fallen cried out as he jumped, and ran for the pod again.

_Just have to keep trying,_ he reminded himself, leaping through the portcullis, and slapping his hands heavily over the heaped items inside. Something clicked, and the repeated taps and shifts of a million tiny pieces of metal began to sound, going from a murmur, to a roar within seconds. _Never concede defeat._

-Not his words, but inspiring nonetheless.

The pod shifted as one of the Golems clapped its massive hands on either side, and started to lift the pod into the air as earth crumbled and metal groaned.

The Fallen hissed as he tore off his clothing bit by bit, shedding the cuirass, unbuckling the skirt, throwing away the gauntlets and knee-guards, until nothing but the torn and tortured jumpsleave of his was left. There was a brief weight that overtook his body, then, a little electronic-sounding chime came out.

"_Initialize._" He muttered painfully. "Immediate recovery procedures. Bypass bootup. Fix me already god damn you."

"_*Internal grid network operational. Augmetics: attaching. Simulation maintenance: green. Spinal Sensory Nodes: found. Nanoassembly Procedure to Completion: full.*_"

"_Injections!_" He roared. The pod rumbled, and he could hear the Golemns groaning outside. Metal was twisting, and light was flicking in from the other side of the pod. The metal buckled, dented, and then belched a plume of sparks. A trio of bladed fingers made of ice punched through the hull and curled upwards, getting a firm grip before the Golem started to peel the pod open like it was a sardine can.

"_*Multiple contusions detected. Broken bones in the thoracic, and upper left extremity regions detected. Administering regenerative solution.*_"

He _hated_ doing that.

But, it was better than getting squashed by a pair of evil Frosty the Snowmen.

He hissed as a series of needles suddenly penetrated the flesh going down the entirety of his central back. His veins felt cold, numb, and then warm. The boot sigils for the internal temperature winked to life, a transparent, purple frame arose and locked his world in an organized panorama. He could feel his skin stitching itself back together, the wound across his back, the lacerations, all of them sealed, leaving only drying trails of blood in their wake. Whatever had gone wrong in his torso snapped back into place numbly.

"…Weapons systems?" He uttered, wincing when the roof of the pod snapped free with a shriek of metal, and the light from outside briefly blinded him. "Tell me the muscle weave is at least ready, baby."

"*_All directives are functioning. Your armory is located by your left foot, and all has remained stable in the absentee period, which is approximately thirty-six days, two hours and twenty-eight minutes. Welcome back.*_" –Quipped a familiarly toneless, female voice.

"Good to be back." The Fallen snatched a small metallic box from the pod's floor, and held it to his hip, where it magnetically stuck. He swiped a few runes floating before his eyes by blink-clicking them, and something heavy began to form from seemingly nothing in his hand's grip.

"_*Aim adjustment settings?_*"

"Nah. I'll kill these fuckers freehand."

Right after the Fallen spoke, an icy fist two times his size came crashing down, and impacted the rent half of the pod dead-center where he knelt. Metal crunched, and the sound of the impact rang out like the shot of a cannon.

The Ice Golem rumbled, and tossed the wreckage of the pod down with a hideous crash. Smoke and debris were everywhere.

Then, from the silence came a curt, and thick _crack!_

-A beam of purple-colored light flickered into life, traveling from the epicenter of the smashed pod, where it punched into the first Golem's blocky chest, and burst out of its back in a spray of vapor and glittering icicle shards.

The Golem groaned and stumbled backward, shouldering into its companion, who likewise had to catch itself on the rim of the crater. The ground shook and they stomped and growled at one another.

It could've been the injury sustained by one of them, but it was mostly confusion. Golems had limited intelligence and were often only as bright as a rat, only knowing decision-making based on what was good to crush and what wasn't, by its creator's order.

But even Golems had some understanding of overkill, and if everything they knew about things smaller than them held out: than that puny little flesh-thing they had just squashed should've been dead.

So what was happening?

The second Golem went to bring down its fist, but another shot of purple light flickered out of the smog. It tore into the creature's shoulder, and severed its arm raggedly from its torso in a blast of vaporous smog. The Golem produced a high-pitched wail, falling on its backside against the rim of the crater.

Suddenly, in a burst of blue flame, a figure sprinted forwards, and was propelled off their heels, suspended briefly on jets of cascading, aqua-colored fire. They landed on the Golem's chest, boots and gauntlets- sealed with layers of multi-banded synthetic weave –crunching painfully into the ice making its flesh. The Golem groaned in torture, trying to reach up with its smaller hand to swat its opponent off.

The humanoid's head- obscured in a tri-angled visor –cocked in what could've been a display of amusement. It raised its arm, and the funneled pistol-weapon in its grip screamed.

_Cakakak –_three beams of purple light, each announced with a sharp crack whipped from the barrel, and the Golem's only remaining hand exploded in a swirling mist of vapor and ice-chunks.

Much like a monkey, the figure seemed to sense the next incoming attack, and so with another burst of blue light, leaped from his victim's chest in a millisecond of movement.

The Golem's companion brought down its fist and wound up smashing it into his ally's chest where the little enemy had been. Ice crunched, and the victim gave off another icy shriek from the agony.

Making sure to direct the thruster-packs located in the rear shoulder and tailbone zones, the Fallen zipped through the air, free in flight, almost like a wingless dragon, and landed atop the other Golem's blocky '_head'._

"Play time's over." The human muttered. "Do me a favor there, big guy: hold these."

There was a glowing vent-port on his forearm. The synthetically sealed fingers of his gauntlet crinkled as he clenched a fist, making sure to clear his wrist from the aim-cone, before the vent flared, and a trio of glowing, luminescent purple orbs zipped out and stuck to the handless Golem's center chest. The creature had a second to groan in confusion.

Then, the orbs detonated.

**_BSHHHKK~!_**

-The Golem vanished from the hips up into a cloud of pieces and smoke, the explosion vaporizing the majority of its torso, and utterly rending the rest. A disembodied ice-arm cartwheeled over the edge of the crater, a thigh bounced two times nearby before settling, and torso-slabs were airborne in a circumferenced area of over fifty feet.

"_*Weapons systems fully functional. Activate Wyvern Blade?*_"

The Fallen jumped and flipped halfway down from the descent, right when he was level with the center of the surviving Golem's chest. A purple pillar of energy whisked to life from the same vent-port that the explosives had come from, extending to the length of a longsword past his hand. For a moment, the Fallen was a spiraling pinwheel with an array of purple glowing teeth. The cuts sliced clean through the solid ice making the Golem's torso, sending mist, sparks and debris raining down in droves.

The Golem teetered back, reaching out as if to clasp some unseen ledge, before it tripped over its own heels, and fell in two cleanly sliced halves onto the ground thunderously.

"_*Efficiency maintained since last screening: 99.8%, two fractals lower than original intent.*_"

"Nobody's perfect, dear." The Fallen grunted, standing up. He jerked his wrist, and the energy blade vanished back into the port with a ghostly hiss. "Activate motion trackers, immediate area. No scans of this world, so no worry."

"_*Trackers show multiple unidentified organisms in sorting sec-_*"

"Yeah yeah I know. Visual rolodex, horizontal, override and manual selection for what the fuck I'm killing and what I'm not. Priority," He paused, waiting for his helmet's internal HUD to get to work on his requests. "-lifeforms here, here, here and here. Tags: Spyra, Terradora, Ignitia, Cynder. Class 1 VIPs. One of them farts, and I know about it, understand?"

"_*Settings adjusted. Further modifications to current rig?*_"

"Assign species list: dragons, Moles, Grublins, Orcs, Apes, marking kill orders."

"*_Warning! Majority of recorded species are listed for kill-order. Continue?*_"

"Yeah, I know, this place kind of sucks a bag of dicks. Good thing I got my cleaning tools back. Maybe it won't be that way for much longer."

* * *

{🐉}

* * *

**_{Dragon Age Inquisition OST: Battle for Haven}_**

* * *

"-_You gotta' get me out of here~! The heat- it's too much~! Heeeeellllppppp~!_"

"Spyra, _dear,_ I'm all for saving the innocent," Ignitia grunted, casting away the bloody, dismembered corpse of an Ape from her claws. "-but did you _have_ to remove the gag before we untied him?"

"_Listen, sista', I was **this** close to gettin' him down from there, ya' hear? THIS CLOSE._" Spyra screeched. She slashed left, right, left, swiped with her tailblade and blasted a crispy trench down the enemy ranks with a thick blast of fiery breath. "_Then, one of these fuckin' asshats was on top of me, and I had to disengage so I could rip off their balls! Yeah, you-!_"

Spinning to free a pair of corpses from her paws, Spyra ducked under a cleaver blade, and caught the offending Ape soldier by the throat with her claw, squeezing until the primate dropped his weapon, and his piss-yellow eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets.

"_You're an asshat, you hear me? Huh?_" She screamed at him. The Ape nodded frantically and started to change colors as she lifted him off the ground. There was a repulsive twitch down the Ape's stomach, and a second later, a ragged _fftttt~! _–noise tore out from its breaches as the poor monkey shit himself in terror. Spyra's nose twitched, and a look of utter horror took over her. "Ohhhh_gawd~, _he just crapped at me!"

"_Heeeeellllpppp~!_" Colcrus screamed at the top of his lungs, still tied to the pole over the diminishing bonfire.

"Spyra, are you injured? What's wrong?" Ignitia cried, fighting to shake off a pair of officers that had thrown themselves over her mighty back and were trying to bring her down.

"_This fuckin' flea-bitten, crooked-toothed, cross-eyed, inbred, dick-lickin', misdirected mother-fucker just shit at me!_" Spyra ranted. "_I'm gonna' kill **every single one of you~!**_"

The Ape whimpered a prayer that was somehow mixed in with the muttered batches of mortified text about its soiled pantaloons. Spyra incinerated his face down to the skull-bone with a blast of fire, and tossed the cindering cadaver into the mob.

"You were right." Terradora commented beside Ignitia as she fought. "Her vocabulary is _gruesome._"

"I-I certainly didn't word it like _that._" Ignitia blushed, modestly ripping her tail free, and snapping the Ape's neck constricted their like it was a toothpick. The body pirouetted and collapsed.

"_There's too many of them!_" Spyra barked. "_Ugh~! And of course, who chooses to wander off like a drunk? The one-man-army! Damn it, Fallen!_"

"He's probably run off with the Cloud Ripper." Terradora breathed in exhaustion, her mace scything a cluster of Apes down with a series of cracking bones and ripping flesh. "That skinless dog."

A Dreadwing screeched as it stampeded through the mass of infantry towards them, right as another trio of its kin landed on the other side of the camp- these ones, saddled and with spear-wielding riders –before they quickly shoved through the melee towards the front.

Spyra's face was covered in gore as she rammed full-speed into an Ape with her horns, and cast him away with a sweep of her neck. A Commander sent her rolling across the ground with a kick to the breast, and the massive Ape followed her, the air quivering under the duress of his savage bellowing. The greatsword in his paws flashed white as beams of enchanted electricity danced up and down the blade. He raised his weapon-

-Then his head vanished.

Cracking sounds, what sounded similar to flintlock gunshots echoed down the cavernous tunnel. One second, the Ape Commander was hauling back to kill her, and the next, _poof._ The first bolt of purple energy vaporized his skull, and the next two turned his upper torso into charred oatmeal, painting his fellows with his dark, coagulating gore.

Before Spyra could follow where the projectiles came from, a figure appeared from above, and landed between the dragons and the Apes, the ground under its heels cracking with little spider-legs.

"-_What just happened-?!_" Ignitia heaved. All of the Apes in the mob were briefly allowed to step back from the engagement, their eyes fixated on the new arrival as gasps, bellows and clinking weapons rippled down the crowd.

"…I'm either seeing shit, or I'm dead and this is hell." Spyra murmured, quivering as she stood up from the dirt.

"-_G-Guys, w-what happened?! W-Who is that?! Is that Malefora?! Oh my Ancestors, it's her isn't it?!_" Colcrus shrieked, still tied to the damned stick.

"That is _not_ Malefora." Terradora shouldered beside Ignitia, panting, her maw stained with dark Ape gore.

The figure was garbed in a darkly colored suit of thin armor. It had a helmet centered with a tri-pointed visor glowing neon green, flaring thruster-packs erected from its rear shoulders and the tailbone plate. A compact cuirass and hip protection curled over a black under-layer of flexible sheet-material that glistened like metal, but bent like cloth. Just inside the gorget of the suit, Spyra could see a hint of the torn-up jumpsleave the Fallen usually wore.

"Fallen?!" She gawked.

The Fallen glanced back at her, and though she couldn't see his face through that snarling visor, somehow she could just tell that the cocky asshole was smiling.

"-_Did the human grow armor or something?!_" Colcrus asked. One of the previously shocked Apes snarled out an insult and nailed him in the head with a tossed cooking pan.

"_Shut up, dinna!_"

"Another develop you knew nothing of." Terradora mumbled in Ignitia's direction. "What have you gotten us into."

"I-I can blame Spyra, can't I?" Ignitia gulped. When Terradora sputtered, the subject matter turned around briefly and shook her head.

"Yeah I'm totally the cause for this, no homo, blame me all you like." Spyra admitted.

"Oi, so da _hooman_ has fancy armor now, big deal! Let's get him!" –An Ape barked. "Fer Chief Vandal!"

* * *

**_{Led Zeppelin: Immigrant Song}_**

* * *

Just like that, the whole mob surged forwards again, and the roar of melee rebounded down the tunnel.

As Spyra leaped back with a surprised yip, preparing to take on a group of infantryman making to engage her, she saw the beginning of the end.

The Fallen stood up and brushed his hands over a tiny silvery box by his hip.

A pistol materialized in one palm seemingly from thin air, and in the other hand, the hilt of what she assumed was some kind of great weapon.

Finally, after all this time she was about to see the _real_ Fallen! The guy who jumped between worlds, kicked ass and shot people up with gear he didn't steal from monkeys!

What could it be? She wondered, trying to steal glanced between every kill and parry she made.

The Fallen was surging forwards in a practiced stride, the pistol belching forth streams of purple bolts that scythed down the Apes by the _tens._

It punched clean through anything it hit. Incinerating mail, leather, canvas, cloth, flesh, fur and bone all at once, leaving nothing but cauterized and blackened wounds in its wake, and misting gore from the immediate impact as hole-ridden corpses flipped and danced away from the barrages.

The Fallen pistol-whipped an Ape in the face, and the front of his head caved in with a spurt of blood. Spyra felt her jaw drop. The Fallen was twice as strong as she had seen him last, maybe even _ten_ times as strong.

And this was all before the weapon in his clasp could finish materializing.

It was halfway up the handle!

It had to be a maul, a Morningstar, a mace, a scepter of power, _something! _Something that he crushed armies with, something that he saved space and time with! Something-

"_Oh my god!_" Ignitia cried out for the second time today. "-_What the fuck is he doing with a **toilet plunger?! **–Oh-! S-Spyra, I'm sorry you had to hear that. Pardon. Ah-hmm._"

-And not just _any_ plunger.

A toilet plunger that was _on fire._

Because apparently, in other worlds, this was a thing.

A lot of the Apes must have been shocked too, because Spyra was able to stare at the bizarre scene for over five minutes without any opportunistic combatants attacking her in the meantime of her stupor.

True to description, a toilet plunger materialized in the Fallen's gauntlet, and no sooner did the black cup at the top finish forming, did the entire weapon flash white, and become wreathed in magical fire.

The Fallen had been mowing down droves with the alien pistol in his grip, but now was the first example of a melee attack with something besides his hands.

He swung the plunger in an upper handed arc.

It connected with an Ape's chin, and knocked his head off his shoulders in a blast of flames and misting blood.

The plunger could kill things.

A toilet implement.

These days just got weirder and weirder.

Blaster and plunger in hand, the Fallen began to systematically slaughter the Apes. Bodies flew with every cleaving arc of the flaming plunger, and whole squads vanished in discombobulated limbs and clouds of blood with each pull of the pistol's trigger.

A Dreadwing charged him, a sonic scream echoing from its fanged maw as visible flurries of sound came flying for the Fallen.

The attack was ignored. The Fallen sprinted through the haze and leaped into the air with a quick jump from his thrusters. He brought the plunger down on the Dreadwing's head, and its skull splattered open like a shaken egg. Shooting the rider, the Fallen grabbed the quivering, massive corpse's shoulder and actually _shoved it out of his way._ It thunderously crashed to the ground as he sprinted around it, killing a path through more infantry.

It wasn't much longer after that, that the Apes- now completely outclassed against weaponry not even native to their reality –broke and were wiped out to a man. The Fallen zipped around the field on his jumpjets, chasing down survivors and killing them in quick and efficient displays of barbarity. Even Terradora had stopped all effort herself, and had sat on the icy ground beside Spyra and Ignitia to watch with fascination as the human mopped up their foes.

The thrusters produced a weak hiss as the Fallen levitated in front of them for a second. He landed with a quiet click of his new, purple-black boots and stood before them, shoulders wide, flaming plunger and gun gripped on either side.

For a moment, nobody said anything.

"…What?" The Fallen shrugged, tiny servo-joints in his suit whining as did so. "I told you all I was looking for stolen property."

"_This_ is the weapon you were speaking of so fondly?" Ignitia looked him down from head to armored toe.

"One of them." He mumbled, looking down at the items in his hands. "Oh, lemme' turn that off." The flames crackling around the plunger vanished in a _snap! _–making the dragons jump. "Sorry."

"I've never seen anyone take on an entire army like that." Terradora's momentary awe diminished, and she ended her statement with a sneer. "Nobody except _Malefora._"

"I might be saying this hastily, but I think if he wanted us dead, he would've done so by now." Ignitia cleared her throat, coughs building up from her lung-problem. "-*_cough* -_Fallen?"

"Why would I want you guys dead? I don't look _that_ scary, do I?" The Fallen's voice was tinged slightly with metal and static as he spoke through the helmet's vent filters. "Well, uh… _ta-dah,_ I suppose. My normal portaljumping gear, in the flesh. The pod must have crashed through the mountain shelf when I first came down, and I guess nobody realized that the hole in the ceiling was a sign that something had come through recently-"

"How do we know you're actually inside there, and this isn't some kind of construct you're controlling from somewhere else?" Spyra accused. Ignitia opened her mouth to say something, but paused, and then made a face that silently told her agreement with Spyra's concerns. Terradora just kept on glaring, like she usually did.

_God, she is such a douche sometimes,_ the Fallen kept to himself. He nodded, the helm bobbing as he did so, and leaned his plunger down cup-first on the ground. Latches and attachments on the neck hissed as he grabbed the helm's chin, and carefully lifted it free of his head. His messy black hair jostled a bit, but he still managed to smile at them as he cradled the headwear by his hip.

"Ladies." He flexed his eyebrows. "Call it good luck: but I think I can make this a whole lot easier for all of us today."

"-I-Impressive." Ignitia breathed, still examining the suit up and down.

Terradora harrumphed and spat in the dirt.

Spyra was the only one who stepped forwards, still covered in the sudor of the battle and Ape gore, she walked a full circle around his legs, sniffing at the plates protecting his shins, running a paw down the side of his hip rig, touching one of the skirt plates protecting his lower waist. The Fallen grinned as he let her poke and prod.

"It's synthetic." He said to her lowly as the inquisitive dragoness hopped onto her hind legs, propping herself up with her forepaws on his shoulders like she normally did. It felt different this time because he was just a bit taller from the suit, and the pauldrons he was wearing were much bulkier than the thin, fleshy shoulders hidden inside them. "Multi-weave plating over a flexibility superiority sleave. It can protect me from almost anything. Even has temp' regulation too, environmental sealing, hazard lockdown and whatnot."

She hummed- perhaps only half-listening –and leaned forwards to sniff at the gorget protecting his collar and neck. Her tail whipped about.

"You were flying." Spyra mumbled, craning an eye at one of the thrusters peaking from over its pauldron. "But you don't have wings. How can you fly without wings?"

"Jet power." He said, even though he knew she wouldn't quite understand, at least not the science behind it. It seemed acceptable enough to her, as she didn't ask again. "It's, uh… a lot to take in, in the moment, I get it if you're a little, ehm… _put off._"

"Put off…" She parroted idly, distracted as she ran a talon through the crease of some of the torso plates. "-_what?_ Put off. No. Nah. Nothin' to be put off, not with me, man, it doesn't scare me or anything. It's different, though, I mean… _shit,_ dude, the longer I'm around you, the crazier my life gets."

"I concur." Ignitia appeared beside her, her amber eyes locked on the various doo-dads and details of the alien armor. She touched the Fallen's gauntlet, eyeing a strange setup of flashing devices sticking from a curved outlet on the arm's top.

"_Ah._" The Fallen gently tugged his arm free from the two dragonesses. "D-Don't touch that one, that's the tactical setup, and my projector nozzle."

"I don't know what either of those things mean, but they sound badass." Spyra breathed. "Show me."

"Stand back."

Both dragons jumped, and Ignitia yelped when he stuck his arm out to the side, and a purple, glowing blade snapped to life protruding from the nozzle above his wrist. The Fallen grinned and gave it a little wiggle, watching as the dragons became like moths to a light from the purple glow.

"…_Wow._" Spyra gasped. "Can I touch it?"

"No." He quickly said, and the blade vanished in a crackle of ozone. "It's superheated molecularly concentrated Wyvern Plasma. It can cut through solid titanium. If you touched it, your fingers would be vaporized."

"Yes, the toys under the alien's possession are quite decadent. Now if we may save Cyrila some time today?" Terradora nudged Ignitia with her wing, glaring at the Fallen's armor. "Preferably before supper."

"Mm, supper." Ignitia mumbled to herself, claws sweeping down the Fallen's plated ribs. "All of this fighting has made me _ravenous._"

"Hey hey, there's plenty of time later." He winked at her, making the Guardian shiver as she rubbed his plating harder without even realizing it.

"_Can somebody please put this fire out?!_" Colcrus called from nearby. "_I don't want to get blisters in my scales, and this rope is chafing. Hello? Anyone?_"

"Ugh, _why_ did we take him with us." Spyra rolled her eyes. "Well, armor-man, whaddya' say you put this shit to use?"

"With pleasure." The Fallen grinned.

* * *

{🐉}

Colcrus at least wasn't the type to complain for long periods of time. He was much quieter though for the last bit of the walk down the tunnel.

"They grabbed me when I walked around a snowdrift." He earlier relented when questioned. "I heard some of the officers arguing about how they were going to use my blood for the broth."

"All that matters is that we were able to act quick enough to free you." Ignitia comforted.

"Where were you guys anyway? I looked all over and I couldn't find any of you."

"Bathroom break." The Fallen grunted, uninterested in providing any real explanation. It was already a struggle enough to get Terradora to keep quiet. He couldn't imagine having a whole troupe of soldiers regimented just like her getting wind of his extra-factional escapades.

The Earth Guardian grunted at his choice of words but said nothing, and Ignitia was silent, unwilling to spark another fight between her allies.

"And what about that armor? Where did that come from?" Colcrus hurried in his walking to try and get closer so he could eyeball the various plates and arrays of synthetics now protecting the Fallen's body. "I've never seen anything like it. Who forged it? Was it the Moles? They work wonders with these kind of things."

"It wasn't the Moles." The Fallen shook his head. "You'll have to excuse me leaving it at that."

"But how come?"

"Because it's none of your business."

The cavern funneled into a small zigzag of black-stoned tunnelways, the corners of which were studded with stone brazier markers containing clusters of purple glowing gems on their tops. They shaded the tunnel in an otherworldly manner, dappling the ceiling, like waves of calmly lapping water would reflect light.

"The cists…" Ignitia muttered. Periodically, they passed stone outcrops in the halls, aisles carved through the rock and rimmed with ornately carved arches. Cist lids capped the end of each aisle, and many of them were cracked open, their contents- little vases and tattered parchments, some bones too –lying scattered on the ground. "Cynder's men have defiled the dead."

"Defiled? Sista', they _stole_ the dead. Unless the Ice's have a thing with just burying the femur or tibia and keeping the rest." Spyra stuck her tongue out in disgust, making sure not to touch some of the ancient dragon bones lying about the detritus. "None of these cists have full bodies in them."

"If Cynder has harvested the dead, that can only mean one thing." Terradora uttered to Ignitia.

"I wish you were incorrect, but I can't think of anything else." Ignitia shivered. "She is a skilled Necromancer. If the Fallen's tale earlier is true about those Ice Golems, than Cynder has weaponized _everything_ the tombs had to offer. Those Golems are ancient guardians of these tunnels created by the Ices. They aren't supposed to attack dragons, or their allies. She must have charmed them."

"You're both certain about that." The Fallen stated, bending to a kneel to pluck a dragon's bone off the ground. He twisted it about in his fingers, the green glow from his visor reflecting off the tanned, bleached material dimly. "The question is: are they all together, or did they get up individually?"

"What the heck are you all blabbering on about?" Spyra quirked a brow.

"I'm going to make Cynder and those Apes pay." Colcrus held back a quiver in his jaw as he gingerly stepped away from one of the ruined cists. Rage was in his normally cool eyes, and his tail was whipping furiously. "They'll pay dearly for this. This is evil. What kind of dragon dishonors the Ancestors in such a way?"

"A desperate one." The Fallen muttered, putting the bone down as he stalked towards the end of the tunnel. "Guys?"

His tone was enough to get all the dragons to unsheathe their claws. Spyra blinked as she trotted to advance beside him like she normally did. That strange blaster weapon materialized in the Fallen's left hand, and the plunger in the right. She watched him wriggle his fingers on each of them in turn. He looked down at her when he noticed her staring.

"Doomblaster." He clarified, holding the gun a bit closer. "Plunger of Doom." He held the plunger closer. "Lots of doom in the names. Don't judge me: it wasn't my idea, neither was the plunger at all in the first place."

"If not yours then whom?" Terradora gawked.

"It's complicated."

"Yeah, well if it's half as whacked as all the other shit that's been bubbling to the surface lately, I can't even imagine the specifics of-" Spyra's words left her as a colossal chamber materialized just outside the last arch of the confined tunnelway. All the dragons and the human looked up, and could not look away. "…_Wow._"

* * *

**_{Pikmin 2 OST: Save Area}_**

* * *

The cavern was large enough to hold a city, and in a sense, it sort of did.

Islands were floating in midair, suspended by some unknown and mysterious arcane manner. Great chunks of snowy mountain-flesh capped with entire castles, ruined spires, watchtowers, atriums and all other manner of sections and pieces of architecture bobbed minutely in every conceivable direction. Crystals colored an opaque greenish-aqua sprinkled the air like millions of snowflakes, each the size of a thumb or thimble. They floated with yet more buoyancy than the great tracts of levitating land did, appearing as a gigantic ocean of glowing snowflakes that would not fall.

The Fallen reached up, and he tapped one of the little crystals floating just above the dome of his helmet. The gem made a minute _clink_ sound, and it sparkled as it slowly twisted away, propelled from the touch as if the chamber lacked gravity.

"The Crystal Tombs of Chrysalis." Ignitia whispered, smiling as she pinched another tiny gem from the air, and held it in her palm. "Spirit Mana."

"There's different kinds of Mana besides green and red?" Spyra asked, still unable to take her eyes off the scene above.

"Spirit Mana is something that deserves much more than an on-the-spot explanation, little one." Ignitia hummed, letting the gem go. It floated slowly away and to oblivion. "These gems have been frozen from age, they cannot be harvested from contact anymore. But they contain the virulent life-energy that once flowed in the veins of the dragons entombed here. This is the one thing Cynder can never take away from this place. The magic will never let her."

"So, I guess somewhere in here, is my auntie, and my grandragon." Colcrus sadly mused, cupping one of the gems from its spot in the air. He ran a talon down the face of it thoughtfully before letting it float away from his paw. "They were buried here years ago."

"*_Alert!*_"

The Fallen's heads-up-display inside his helmet lit red. The motion-trackers and vitals registrar was indicating something else in the great chamber with them. Not interrupting the dragons' talk, he blink-activated the link and took a look at a cluster of red blips.

Vital signs registered as Apes, and… something else. Something that moved, that had no heartbeat to be recorded.

"Together." He decided from the question earlier, under his breath.

"Did you say something?" Spyra's eyes were glassy as she looked right through him, still transfixed by the beautiful tombs.

Vital signs for Apes, Cynder's defiling of the dead, and of a dragon.

It was her.

It had to be Cyrila. Cynder's tag was absent here. At least for now, but she could've been shielding herself with magic. His suit was designed to work around magical enchantments, but those procedures didn't always work.

It _was_ magic, after all.

"There, on that island." Terradora nodded.

* * *

**_{Dragon Age Inquisition OST: Battle for Haven}_**

* * *

The party stepped to the edge of the plateau that the tunnelway disgorged onto. The tiled floor of the tomb broke away raggedly for a cliff face, again dropping so deeply below the floating islands that every down there was swallowed by blackness.

One of the islands overhead contained the crumbling remains of an atrium plaza, bobbing silently in the chamber's air. Blue light showed forth as a pulsating pillar from the center of the plaza, and at its eye upon the ground, chained to a black steel pedestal was a beautiful dragoness coated in a creamy blue coat with a purple breast and belly. She had horns jagged like icicles, and the features of her face were sculpted as if they were chiseled from solid rime in perfect clarity. Her mighty, purple wings were chained down along with her crescent-tipped tail, and her eyes were serenely shut. At the tip of the pedestal, held in a small chalice-attachment was a clear crystal, now glowing vibrantly with luminescent, blue energy.

"A Siphoning Crystal!" Ignitia cried. "Ancestors, Cynder's killing her!"

"Talk to me Ignitia." The Fallen's thrusters lit up, and he hunched in preparation for a leap.

"Remove the crystal." Terradora barked, spreading her wings. "Get to the crystal and get it off the pedestal, break the ritual! That is all that matters! _Fly!_"

The air may have been thin up here, but so pumped on adrenaline, and having already braved it once, none of the dragons were impeded when they took off with haste into the crystal-ridden air. The Fallen rocketed off his heels beside them, and for a while, his eyes were locked on the drop below them, lead building in his guts.

Flying.

It'd been a month, he wasn't used to it.

_Deal with it. You lost your fear of heights._

The Fallen raised his chin, fighting off the freeze with a labored growl. He glanced over his pauldron at Spyra, and saw that the purple dragoness was looking right at him.

With her golden and orange wings spread fully, Spyra couldn't help a smile tugging at the edges of her muzzle, a toothy one. She sidled a little bit closer, mindful to not catch her membranes on the jet-streams cascading from his thrusters.

"I never thought I'd fly with you." She called.

"**I did**." He said back, voice amplified via the little speakers on his helm. It made Spyra jolt in surprise, but her smile only got wider.

"Damned Apes!" Colcrus cursed, nodding down at the platform as it got closer. "Look, there's more of them over there!"

"Wait a second, what's the deal, those ones look different. Another tribe?" Spyra glanced at Ignitia.

"_Cold Legionnaires._" Terradora snarled. "Cynder's bodyguards. We shall see how _'elite'_ they are against my claw."

"Underestimate them not." Ignitia announced. "They are purpose-trained dragon-killers."

Though their numbers appeared relatively small, the Cold Legion Apes were no less imposing for their namesake. Each of them had snow-white fur and was bedecked in purple-black armored plating. A cluster of them had gathered on the precipice of what might've once been a bridge extending from the island's chin. There was a Commander with an enchanted warhammer that glowed vibrant white and trailed snowflakes in the air, he pointed at them with the hammer and bellowed loudly.

"Spika-turrets!" Ignitia cried.

Similar to the structures they had encountered in the swamps, a pair of the devices had been bolted into the stone on this side of the island, and were swiveling to face up at them. These contraptions, however, were different. They were made of the same purple-black metal that the Legionnaires' armor was, and a pair of antenna-like prongs stuck out on either side of the dais ring like snail-eyes, a crackling band of purple electricity dancing between them.

Their barrels flashed, and instead of solid, sharpened metal slugs, it was bolts of Shadow Mana that careened up into the air to meet them.

"_Lookout!_" Ignitia shouted.

The two Guardians and Colcrus spread out their flight paths as bolts of purple death screamed between and around them. The cannons below had no need to reload or pause their rates of fire, due to the magic in their designs. The operators were unperturbed and continued to pour fire up at the party.

"_Cssshhh this is alpha-niner-foxtrot to base, we're engaging evasive maneuvers, over._" Spyra spoke into her bunched fist as she weaved between the bolts with the Fallen.

"Are you serious?" He half-joked as he jittered back and forth with the help of the thrusters. His timing was off and he wavered each time. Again, he needed to readjust to being in the air after so long.

"Hey, not all of us can yank a space-suit and all the gadgets and doohickies with it out of our asses. I gotta' compensate with _some _kinda' high-tech stuff!" Spyra rebuked. "_Command, we have a no-good-stickler onboard, permission to eject via-air-lock, over._"

"I'll show you an airlock."

"_Command, we are experiencing unauthorized innuendo. Permission to fuck when this is all over, over._"

"Permission granted." He tapped the barrel of the Doomblaster on his helm. "See you down there."

The Fallen spun his shoulders, and nose-dived for the island below.

"*_System functionality addendum. High-risk environment of high-end magical projectiles detected. Reactivating energy shields.*_"

He watched briefly a small meter come to life on the side of his vision, it filled completely to neon green, and for a moment, a previously invisible barrier of thin, wavey energy flashed about his entire form.

If these Apes wanted to play, then he was going to play by _his_ rules from now on.

The Fallen tucked his legs up and gunned the energy in his thrusters, landing with enough concussive force that the ground cracked and sent wads of stone and dirt airborne. A small cluster of Apes in the immediate impact-zone flew apart as the shockwave ruptured organs, separated limbs and sheared flesh from shattered bones. The Fallen's shields only briefly flared before the EMP protector finished absorbing the impact, and they immediately zipped back up to full.

A Cold Legionnaire bellowed and jumped without fear through the array of corpses and the crater surrounding him. The Fallen swung with the Plunger of Doom, and to his surprise, the Ape landed in a roll and shimmied right past the blow, marking it as a miss.

Before he could blink, the Legionnaire appeared by his flank, and the black axe in its grip slammed dead-center the space of his helm's visor. The Fallen's shields flared and his head was torn to the side violently, but a mere twitch in comparison to what would've happened had he been bare.

The axe exploded in a shower of sparks, and for a second, the Ape stared- dumbfounded –at the crinkled and bladeless hilt of his useless weapon. The Fallen shattered his ribcage with a swipe of his plunger, and vaporized his face with a point-blank shot before moving on.

A cyclone of whipping flame announced Spyra's arrival. Cold Legionnaire plummeted to their deaths over the edge of the island cliff, burning and screaming as they went. She galloped into the ranks of a squad and started swiping them to pieces with her claws, bolts of Electricity and Fire killing those who she could not reach, or stalling the larger officers whose armor was too thick until she could find a vulnerable point.

Terradora shattered the ancient brickwork of the floor when she landed, and charged another officer like a bull. His axe bounced off her crown uselessly before her horns impaled him through the guts and burst bloodily out of his back. The Guardian of Earth swiped her neck and threw the screaming, gore-vomiting victim tumbling off the cliff.

"Protect the ritual!" The Cold Legion's Commander barked, and surprisingly with proper speech, at least, for an _Ape._ "Do not allow them to sever the crystal!"

One of the turret emplacements exploded into a ball of Shadowy-backwash and flames as Ignitia spat a fireball dead-center inside the operator's compartment. The second met its end when the Fallen snapped a Legionnaire's neck, shot him three times with the grenade-launcher of his port-vent, and then kicked the corpse across the plaza, where it landed inside the operator bay. The plasma grenades detonated and cooked off whatever supernatural payload Cynder had armed these special guns with. The explosion was fantastic, and for a second, dominated the battlefield as a sort of centerpiece.

"_I think we're winning!_" Colcrus called cockily, letting a Legionnaire's corpse slouch back with blood jetting from the claw-wounds marking his chest.

Spyra laughed as a pair of Apes were cast away from her, blackened and twitching from the blast of lightning she'd hit them with. Her amusement was cut short. A Legionnaire officer flanked her, dodged her claws and hit her across the head with his plate-shield, rocking her world in all the wrong and painful ways possible.

"_Lucky hit._" She mumbled, shooting up his body like a ferret before grabbing his ugly baboon-looking face, and jettisoning a fine stream of flame point-blank into his eyes.

These Apes were certainly better than the ones they had fought before. It took Spyra a minute to see, but there were only a quarter of the amount of Cold Legion, in contrast to what was usual for the rest of their kind. These guys fought like the Orcs back in Oversight.

Spyra went to charge the last Ape in her way, but a blast of plasma from the Fallen clipped into his hip and severed his body in half with a spray of blood. Spyra shielded her face from the mist with her wing, and stared for a moment as she watched the Ape die on the ground.

His eyes were open, and for a moment, he recognized what had happened, before they rolled up into his head, and his mouth slung ajar limply.

She shivered, and then gazed past her dead enemy.

Guardian Cyrila! She was just over there! She had to remove the crystal.

"Go Spyra!" Ignitia cried, grappling with a pair of Legion. She slashed one's face open and reeled when the other batted her flank with a studded maul. "_Go!_"

When another Ape attacked from the side, Colcrus appeared and bit down over the Legionnaire's ankle, dragging him away from her path as the Ape screamed and kicked. Spyra galloped over to the pedestal, gasping when she saw the sorry state of the dragoness chained within.

Cyrila looked dead, if she wanted to be honest with herself. The Guardian was caught in a disturbed looking sort of sleep. One side of her face was bloodied and swollen, she was covered in bruises and grit, and a glowing pillar of blue light was emanating off of her and going up into the air as high as could be seen. The crystal kept in the chalice-carving was pulsating more and more as its empty, gray-shade was replaced with the Guardian's pure Ice Mana.

"Okay, I can do this." Spyra whispered, wriggling her talons as she stood on her hinds, and held her forepaws over the Siphoning Crystal. She paused, sweat running down her scaly temple.

She was afraid to touch it.

What if it started sucking shit out of _her_ too?

_Brave, damn it, you're the Purple Dragon! You're supposed to be a brave dragoness, not a pussy!_

She had begun to chew her tongue when a bird-like screech almost deafened her.

Spyra had time to look up, before a black, crimson-padded foot planted into her face. She rolled from the kick with a loud '_Oof~!' –_leaving her chops.

"How can a little thing like you become such a constant and intrusive nuisance?" Cynder snarled, landing between Spyra and the pedestal. "_Those_ cookies still have some time to bake, little hatchling. Paws off."

"_Ughhhhh,_ callin' me a baby's a surefire way to get me to flame-broil your slutty ass." Spyra sneered.

Cynder didn't step towards her to meet Spyra's charge. Instead, the black dragoness sported a wicked grin that spread all the way down her beaked muzzle.

Spyra felt the ground shudder as something big came up from behind her.

"See? Even her past relatives don't want her off this pedestal." Cynder giggled. "I should know: I asked them, in a sense."

The sound this thing made was indescribably horrible. It was the tortured wheeze of a hundred frail, elderly souls taking their last breath at once. Spyra looped around, blinking in horror as a ten-foot-tall monstrosity made of bones lumbered towards her.

The creature's limbs were made from arm and leg bones stuck and bound together with Necromantic magicks. Its torso and head were made from bundles of dragon skulls, each of which had eyes glowing a sickly yellow, and whose eternally grinning jaws clacked repeatedly in silent laughter. With each step of its clubbed feet made from spinal columns arranged like toes, all the bones clattered and rattled like sick ornaments.

Its arms each ended in barbed, wide and fat claws with fingers made sharp from loops of combined ribs. One of these reached out sluggishly for Spyra's throat.

The purple dragon met the disgusting display with a roar of challenge, despite the legitimate fear gnawing at her guts. She slipped under the claw as it swiped in a near miss, and showered the abomination's midsection with flames.

The monster shrieked with a hundred different weak voices and staggered back, but to her shock, the flames crackled to nothingness shortly after settling to briefly flicker on the otherwise unmarred bones and skulls. The latter seemed to clack their jaws faster, as if their laughter had only risen.

"Your Mana will not work on the Bone Golem." Cynder cackled. "If you stand still, it might kill you too quickly for it to carry out what I've ordered it to do to you: which is skin you alive. I'd advise you choose the prior only for your own sake. But please, do keep fighting it, you'll only make it that much more entertaining for me."

A quick blow with her tail succeeded in knocking free some of the bones and a skull or two, but the monster just shrieked again and kept coming. She spat lightning bolts at it, but they all flickered away the moment they made contact with the bones. She tried to freeze its feet, ram into it masked as a flaming comet, _nothing_ even slowed it down.

The Golem's bony hand crashed into her when she tried to take off, swatting her from the air to send her rolling painfully.

"Rend her flesh!" Cynder barked, and the Golem lumbered closer. "Rip her apart, and make sure to do it _slowly._" She drooled.

A blast of flurrying cold Mana smacked into the Golem's chest as Colcrus charged from Spyra's flank. The Golem's skulls chattered their tongueless mouths as it turned to regard its newest opponent.

"_Cynder!_" He cried in challenge. "_You'll pay for this! I swear!_"

"Who the hell are you?" Cynder scoffed.

Nearby, the Fallen viciously cut his way through opponent after opponent, his eyes locked onto the scene the second Spyra had been cast to the ground. A Cold Legion officer and his squad utterly stalled his advance however, his shields flaring when the Ape leader slammed a mace's head into his breast and sent him stumbling.

"Fancy suit of yours, _hooman,_" The officer bellowed. "Let's peel it off of you and tenderize you a bit, before the Mistress takes you away!"

"I think you might've misread her intentions." The Fallen grunted. He shot the officer through the face, and pancaked one of his men with an overhead bring-down of his plunger's cup. The crack of bones and squelch of meat echoed around the whole plaza. "If she told you she wanted to eat me, I guess she didn't really lie per-say."

Colcrus was maddened with fury. Perhaps it was more volatile than any of them had noticed on their way since passing the cists. But the Fallen could've easily recognized the hatred burning behind the Ice Drake's eyes had he been close enough to witness it. He was gunning for Cynder. The Golem was just in the way.

Sidestepping one of its spine-made heels as it crashed down in an effort to crush him, Colcrus leaped past the heel and threw himself at Cynder.

"Have at ye then, Northern pig!" She snarled, her tailblade glancing aside his claws with a burst of sparks. She backed ground to him past Cyrila's pedestal, allowing the drake to advance just a smidge before she returned with blindingly fast strikes of her wingblades. "I feel like I remember you after all. You're that pest I swatted aside to catch the slumbering Guardian beside us."

"You defiled my people's Ancestors!" Colcrus howled, making Cynder bark in pain as he slipped between her blows and spat an icicle in her face that shattered in a glassy burst of dust.

"I'm glad you two could get acquainted." Spyra grimaced, her paws shivering as she stood up, and defiantly glared at the Bone Golem as it closed in to kill her. "But at the same time and all: _fuck you,_ you rank-ass pile of rotting shit."

Suddenly, a cluster of purple glowing orbs smacked onto the Golem's torso. They whined, and the monster had a second to gawk before they detonated in a brilliant corona of purple flames. The Golem's shriek echoed everywhere as dragon bones bounced and rattled all over the place, a macabre rainstorm of body-parts showering the few remaining participants of the fight.

Whatever the grenades hadn't blown to smithereens was blasted to bits when the Fallen landed in the middle of the dying explosion, the concussion casting aside all the bones and shattering them into splinters.

"_Spyra!_" The Fallen barked. "_Come on!_"

Spyra leaped up and charged with him towards Cyrila, Colcrus and Cynder, the two heroes slicing away a squad of Apes that attempted to stop them.

The Ape Commander from before appeared as well, swinging that cold-enchanted hammer of his and bellowing a cry of challenge. The Fallen shot him through the throat and chest and Spyra sent his body flipping on a trail of soot when a bolt of lightning impacted his breast.

Cynder reeled from another hit landed upon her chest. She hit Colcrus with her tail and sent him skidding across the stone of the plaza as he tried to catch a grip and stop himself. She gawked as the armored and alien form of the Fallen got closer and closer, bulldozing his way through her men as if they were nothing.

Her king.

What had happened to him?

"_Fallen…?_" Cynder whispered, backing up, and jumping when she felt her heel touch the cold metal of the pedestal behind her.

"**Get the crystal**." The Fallen's voice bellowed out from the speakers in the chin of his helm, his voice booming like thunder.

Immediately, Spyra took flight and zipped through the air right past Cynder's head. The black dragoness shrieked in rage and tried to spin around to catch her nemesis: but something grabbed her tail, and before Cynder could blink, a colossal force pulled her backwards.

She skidded across the tiled floor back and away from the pedestal. The Fallen had grabbed and yanked her, some newfound strength of his completely overpowering the will of her limbs. Cynder roared angrily, spreading her wings, her tattoo-runes glowing crimson as she presented herself threateningly to her chosen mate.

"_What are you doing?!_" She cried to him.

"**What's right**." The Fallen's static-laced-voice barked out from the headwear. Cynder was stalled briefly, examining the strange attire now covering his form.

Flames crackled as Ignitia scythed down the last of the Cold Legion Apes in a fiery blast. Cynder- panicked -looked all around her, realizing that her plan was crumbling to dust right in front of her.

"-_Agh-! F-Fallen-! I can't get this damned thing out!_" Spyra shouted, her fangs clenching as she grasped the Siphoning Crystal, and yanked on it with all her might, unable to even get it to budge.

"Cynder, stand down." The Fallen thumbed a small rune on the side of his Doomblaster, recharging the fluctuation ducts in place of fresh plasma. Cynder glanced at the weapon without moving her face from him. "You know I don't want to point this at you."

"I was doing this for _us,_ you fool." The dragoness quivered, emotion threatening to break through her resolve. "If I try anything else, Malefora will overload my mutations and eviscerate my physical form. She'll kill me. And while the option of death has been an appealing one for so long, I won't take it, now that I've found you."

"I don't want you to take it! Or like this either! There has to be another way."

Cynder could only make a pained noise of grief. She was finished trying to explain to him the truth.

"_-Fallen~!_" Spyra growled behind him, the crystal jolting once in the chalice, but otherwise unmoving despite her efforts.

Cynder peered past the Fallen's pauldron and eyed the swirling blue energy inside the crystal.

_Full enough._

She still had a chance, even if it meant not getting everything she had wanted out of this.

"Cynder, I'm not going to shoot you." The Fallen stated grimly, stepping closer to her with his weapons raised. "Yield. _Please._"

"_No._" She hissed.

The Cloud Ripper exploded into a broiling hurricane of twisting, black, Shadowy tendrils. The Fallen felt his feet leave the ground, and then he went blind.

* * *

{🐉}

As it was, it turned out that Rava was neither of the things Morinth had expected her to be in this kind of situation. She had looked like either an angry or a depressed sort of drunk, someone who just always channeled the one of two extreme negatives whenever they got inebriated.

In all actuality, the Electric Dragon was a _tipsy_ drunk. All of a sudden, it was as if she was existing in a spatial pocket where everything was tilted, and the air was poisoned with heavy doses of sleep-aids that threatened to steal consciousness at any given moment.

If Morinth hadn't been so slammed herself, she would've found the behavior hysterical to observe, and it probably would have doubled as delicious ammunition to use against Rava later on during an originally-perceived unavoidable fight.

Unfortunately for her more impish side, Rava had become a freaking tree-hugger, who apparently talked to butterflies, and fantasized about having sex with garden weeds, all to the tunes of life-flutes and recreational narcotics.

She could say with confidence that _nobody_ in the entirety of the Dragon Realms would've expected that outcome. And Morinth could still say that, despite being a social pariah herself.

_Cheeky freaky, that…_

The dragon hummed as she tipped back her mug, and the last of her ale slithered down her throat, the burn slowly turning from bitterly pleasant to scalding as the third cup was countered. She belched, loudly, earning some glares from nearby patrons of the watering hole.

**_BANG~!_**

-Rava put her fist into the counter, nearly falling out of her stool as she doubled over and laughed until she couldn't breathe.

"I never figured you as one for a sense of humor, luv." Morinth slurred, chuckling when her need for a paw on the bar arose. _Everything_ was funny, even the possibility of collapsing into an inebriated heap. "You're just full of surprises."

"_Pah._" Rava lowered her snout, gazing longingly at Morinth as she tested the spin of her ale in the mug. "One to talk, I see."

"How's that?"

"What about _you?_ Back when we were in the Academy, I thought you were just another weak and uninspired 'ness, who couldn't figure out her own- *_hkk* -_crap from crop." Rava downed the whole cup and slammed it back on the bar with a refreshed gasp. "Boy was I wrong. You have balls, Morinth. More dragons should've told you that throughout your life."

"_Ah-hm._" Morinth cleared her throat, suddenly feeling a tad more sober. She tried to cover it up with a cheap grin. "I think my history belied a little less than that, actually. But I appreciate the, ah… the _optimism._"

"Optimism. Shmoptimism." Rava giggled bubblishly. The Electric hen put her chin in her palm and drummed her talon on her cheek, her eyes scanning up and down Morinth's onyx chest. "Belied. _Schemeid-_ uh… _Tel-ied? _Uh… I-I can't think of a good rhyming nonsense word for- _*hkk* -_that one."

"Who needs nonsense words when you already have to think of solutions every day." Morinth tisked musingly. "Life gives us enough problems, dumps them in our laps, _and expects us to sooolllveee tthheeeemmmmm~!_"

She laughed gleefully as her note concluded, and yet more nearby patrons joined the crowd of glare-givers and brow-raisers. The Mole tender probably would've kicked them out a while ago if they both hadn't been soldiers.

And if he wasn't afraid of Morinth because of her skin.

_Cheeky little furry fucker._

"One more round there, sir. I think I can bench it good enough." Morinth slid her mug over the bar at the little tender, who was busy watching her behind a pair of spectacles too small for his wide, long-nosed face, and had been polishing an empty glass with a rag.

The Mole put down his things and took up her mug, but he paused, immediately earning Morinth's full attention as he glanced between her and the spigot of the big barrel in the back of the chamber.

"Is there a problem?" Morinth pleasantly asked, even fluttering her eyelids at him daintily. She may have been drunk, but she wasn't incoherent.

At least, not yet.

The Mole mumbled something under his breath, something low, and something with which he sought answers from the inside of her cup. She couldn't hear him well enough, but deduced it as some array of words around her having too much and him wanting to cut her off.

"Oi, speak up." She started to frown, and he started to sweat. This was done purposefully. Seeing the color drain from his face was delicious for her. "You aren't afraid to give a dragon a piece of your mind, are you? Or is just because…" She put her paws on the counter, flexing her talons. "…of something else? Care to share?"

The barkeep looked like he was constipated, what with how much his face scrunched up as he struggled to find words.

"Ma'am," She heard him utter. "you're concerning my customers."

"With me myself or my behavior, luv?"

"…Uh-"

"Yeah? Yeah, that's what it's all _*hkk* -_about?" Rava slurred, nudging Morinth over as she leaned across the bar and sneered at the keep. "You giving my friend here hell, you rat?"

"_Pah! '_Friend'…" Morinth giggled, her attention swinging from the tender to the other dragon. "-you have a long long way to go before we get _there_, Rava-mava…"

"-_*hkk* -h-ha~! Hahahaaa~! R-Rav- Rava-mava… oh that's… ha…_"

The Mole huffed, clenched a fist and planted it on the counter, jamming a finger in Morinth's face.

"This is _my_ establishment and I've had it up to here with the two of you. I'm asking you to leave this instant." His accented voice crawled out from behind his crooked whiskers. "If it wasn't enough that the two of you drank yourselves out of the chairs, one of you just happens to be the half-breed that everyon-"

She normally wasn't so fast. It made Morinth think: maybe she _should_ get drunk before every battle from now on after this discovery.

Because apparently, when she was shitfaced she could throw a wicked mean hook.

Like _really_ wicked.

The little Mole man literally tossed head over heels and went airborne to the other side of the bar. He met a pile of crates and bottles with a great clatter of debris and shattering of glass. Someone in the tables hollered, and Rava tumbled out of her stool and onto the floor, laughing too hard to keep her balance.

"-_I'm not a half-breed-!_" Morinth screamed, flaring her wings and leaning over the counter to glare daggers at the collapsed barkeep as he twitched in the piled clutter. His head was bleeding, and he silently writhed from the obvious harm she had done. "_I'm not a half-breed, and if you ever well say that again, I'll kill you!_"

"-_Yeah-! -*hkk* -and then I'll kill you too…_" Rava slurred.

"I think I've seen enough." A paw landed on Rava's shoulder, and hoisted her up and onto her unsteady feet. Before the drunk 'ness could protest, another paw gripped her forepaw and yanked it past her ribs, making her grunt in pain. "You two don't want to leave? Let us help you."

Morinth swung around with murder in her eyes, but even drunk, she found herself faltering.

There were two drakes, one with green scales and another with red, still wearing bits of their armor plating and travel rigs. They were soldiers, just like her and Rava, and the two of them restrained the latter effortlessly with a claw each.

"This doesn't have to get any rougher than it has already. Come with us, or we'll drag you out."

"-_I don't gotta… l-listen to- *hkk* -you… you… you fluffy gerbil-thing…_" Rava heaved, squirming pathetically in the other dragons' grips.

"You and what cheeky army?" Morinth sneered, the floor thundering as she slid off and landed- prepared –from her barstool.

Movement drew her attention to over the red drake's wings. Six more soldiers, a quad of more drakes and two females closed, the whole batch funneling out from a dining booth they had been using previously. Some of them still had blades affixed to the ends of their tails. Morinth didn't.

_But I still have my claws,_ she started to growl, hunching lower, feeling so enraged that she didn't even care about how badly she was outnumbered.

"Drop the alcoholic before I drop you." She snapped.

"-_*hkk!* -h-hey! I-I'm not… I'm not a scholar…_" Rava wretched, and both the dragons restraining her cringed as a torrent of tan-colored vomit pattered onto the floor. "-_Oh… egh…_" Rava spat to try and feebly clear her mouth out afterwards. "-_S-Sorry about the ceiling… I mean… the floor… M-Morinth? This alcohol isn't working a-as well as I wanted it to…_"

"Just take it easy." One of the other drakes stepped around the mess, getting closer to Morinth. He reached out with his paw, and firmly gripped her shoulder. "We weren't asking when we-"

"_Don't touch me._" Morinth shrieked. She tore back from his grip and punched the drake right in the nose at the tip of his snout.

The dragon barked and scrambled back into a pair of chairs with a crash of wood. The other five were on Morinth in a heartbeat. She was driven to the floor with a horrible thud. She hit someone in the face with the joint of her wing, lassoed a throat with her tail and bit down on something until she tasted blood.

She wasn't exactly a stranger to barfights, given her rearing, but this couldn't even be called one. A barfight assumed somewhat even footing on both sides. The squad of soldiers ran her over like she was made of cardboard.

A punch knocked her daylights, another took the breath from her belly, and a tail-whip across the face saw her cheek swell up and nearly seal her left eye shut.

"-_Agh-! _She bit me!" One of them hollered, and Morinth's world became a whirlwind of blurred motion as she yanked from the floor.

"Get them out of here."

"_Nono, _not that way, c'mon."

Morinth tried to squirm and resist her captors. But she was too weak (and too smashed) to put up enough of an effort. The hinges on a ratty door squealed and paws thundered down a wooden stoop. The paws clenching her released all at once, and Morinth found herself sailing several feet, before her face and chest wetly met a puddle of stinking mud with a repulsive splash. Morinth gagged and shook herself wildly, trying to get the horrible stuff off of her as she batted at her face and spit out the contents of mouth repeatedly.

There was a second splash right beside her, and even though she had mud in her eyes, she knew it was Rava, because the weight pressing into her flank was rolling back and forth, still laughing and sputtering.

"_Bloody cocks-!_" Morinth screamed, staggering onto her feet. The door back inside slammed shut, and the click of a lock was all she needed to know that the deal was sealed just as much. "-_Bastards…_"

"-_T-This is- *hkk* -fun~! Hhahaaaa~…_" Rava rolled back in forth in the mud like a sow taking a midday tumble in the pen. Her laughter started to bubble. "-_Mmmm… I-I'm… I'm *hkk* sorry, really, aha-haa… hm…_"

"Oh, is that it now?" Morinth growled, falling onto her backside in the mud with a plop as she glanced around her new environment.

They'd tossed them in an alley behind the tavern building. Long forgotten and splintering crates were piled up against a wall, and drainage runoff from all the rain the last few days dribbled from the mouth of a gutter whose line ended in the very puddle they were swimming in.

Morinth huffed and used her thumb to swipe away some mud from her eyes, her wings wilting under the disgusting new coat they now sported. _Brown._ Such a stylish color.

"Just like old times." She huffed. "I bet you're having a trip down cheeky memory lane, eh, Rava? Now you know how it feels to be _thrown_ instead of doing the throwing."

"_-Throwing-_" Rava laughed, and slowly, her cackles devolved into muted hums, and then those still turned into what Morinth realized were sobs. "-_*hkk* -N-Nera… I-I'm s-s-sorry…_"

"Bugger, just _shut up,_ Rava." Morinth spat. "You talk to ghosts too much. Now get up."

Rava heaved as she writhed in the mud and detritus, squishing and slicking noises burbling out with each twist of her limbs. When Morinth offered a claw, she swatted it away and stumbled back up herself.

"_…T-This isn't what I had in *hkk* mind earlier…_" Rava croaked, shivering as the cold mud clung to every inch of her scales. She swallowed, and her gut moaned in torture. "_-That place is supposed to give a discount to army. I think we were cheated. It's my fault._"

"There's something I can't argue with." Morinth huffed, limping towards the mouth of the alley. "I hope you didn't have any fancy plans in order past due, luv, because the only thing you're doing is chipping all the cheeky shit off you. Go back to the barracks, Rava, I'm going home."

"W-Why should I?" Rava grumbled, swaying unevenly after her, mud dripping off both hens and leaving a dark trail alongside their black paw-prints. "So that I can talk to Wingshear all night? *_hkk* _-Pah. That's not good for me."

"Oh pardon, and _this _is?" Morinth glared back at her as they reached the street. The alcohol was pretty much gone by now for her, replaced with a chilly realization of how today had gone. "Earlier today, I woke up with one set of problems, and that was good enough for me. I was never the bloody magnet, Rava, not for nights like these. Why in the Ancestors' names did you have to make me question that?"

"I-I… I just wanted to… to atone."

"If you had wanted to _atone, _you would've left well-enough alone." Morinth shook her head, catching Rava with her tail and nudging her roughly. "And walk straight, you."

"I don't sleep anymore, Morinth, and I couldn't just let you go once I'd found you." Rava murmured dejectedly. "And believe me, there's part of me that begged me to not approach you."

"Why not listen?"

"Because it's the same side of me that was in control when I was younger." Rava swallowed. "I'm never allowing myself to be like that again. _Ever._"

"Such a high-class job you've obviously sported on that." Morinth glared at a passing duo of staring Moles as the muddy dragons limped down the street. "Taliopia should've been here with me. She would've told me what to do, given me the right advice, something much better than what _you_ do, with your bad influence."

"I paid for those pints."

"Just like you're paying for drinking two-thirds of them. There's a cheeky point?" Morinth shot down.

"Fuck you, Morinth."

"Oi', _no,_ dearest Rava, fuck _you._ If you wanted a damned therapist-dragon, there are services within a soldier's payroll for that! But don't come to _me._ See that? It's _me_ who pays for it all, even when you show up with the coin you don't blow away on booze and who in the greatest heavens knows what else." Morinth shook mud droplets everywhere to try and clear her wings, smirking sourly when a big glob slapped into Rava's face. "My cheek looks like a grapefruit, I smell like shit and ale and my pride just took a neat stab. How could I have been so stupid?"

"Why don't you ask _Taliopia_." Rava swiped the mud off her snout, flashing her fangs angrily. "Isn't the mate supposed to be the best consul of a dragon? Too bad that didn't work out so well for those outside the freaking clique."

"_Clique? _Just go and whine to Wingshear! I'm sure he's used to it by now."

"Wingshear? Do you think I _want_ to listen to another of his dreadful childhood tales about how he didn't have a care in the world and liked chewing on wooden blocks? Just get angrier and kill me *_hkk* -_please!" Rava cried. "At least you haven't been alone, you cushy thing. One night in the dumpster with the rest of the trash and you're *_hkk* -_livid."

"_Ha!_ If you think I'm outside the lowest scum in this city, then you're even more delusional than I thought you were, luv." Morinth scoffed. "Did you hear me earlier? I grew up in this very mud we're covered in. Tonight's just familiar is all, of times I wanted to forget. No thanks to _you._ As I said: this should be Wingshear's department, not mine."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Rava glared at her, spitting more acid from her mouth and onto the street.

"…Wingshear…" Morinth gestured a dripping wing at her. Rava blinked stupidly. "…You mean… you aren't…?"

"…Wait… -_Oh, w-what?! _No! Not at all!" Rava blushed, little bands of lightning trickling up and down the rows of her fangs. "-Gods, what gave you that idea?"

"You both could've fooled me." Morinth countered with a click of her tongue. "That's an inaccuracy?"

"He's never touched me." Rava scowled.

"Well, did you ask him to?"

"None of your business."

"You should ask him to." Morinth shivered, anger rousing in her chest through the pain of being punched there. She had never longed for the Fallen's touch more than she did now. It would certainly make her feel a little less like shit. "It would've served you better than messing around with me. I swear, the city of Oversight is liberated, the stupid Comet Festival keeps getting pushed back and the Purple Dragon has come, and I'm spending my night in a puddle."

"I can't say sorry anymore." Rava frowned, sniffling. "But judging by the way you talk, I think even Taliopia's being left out of a lot."

"Shut up, you don't know me or her." Morinth snapped. "And honestly after all the up-and-up just now, I… I don't want to speak anymore, with anyone."

"Me neither." Rava childishly retorted, sneezing when a wad of mud got in her nose. "I think I just tasted it."

"You can get used to it." Morinth stared at the street as she limped home, trying to ignore the path of mud she left in her wake all down the pedestrian path. "I sure did."

* * *

{🐉}

There was no ground nor direction. No up or down. The Fallen free-floated in blackness. Whatever magic Cynder had conjured was more than effective. The insides of his helmet were alight with alarms and chimes. The scanners were baffled, the magnetic centering core was offline and the environment quality filters were clogged. There wasn't a physical explanation for half of these things, though.

His suit may have been powered by some of it, but hot damn if he didn't _hate_ when magic was used against him. Spellcasters were always a number-one problem when dealing with a combat situation. It was too bad he couldn't bring himself to shoot the most dangerous one he had ever encountered.

When the blackness finally wavered, all at the once, the Fallen fell onto his face with a clatter of metal against the ground, his Doomblaster and plunger landed on either side of his prone form.

The clouds of Shadow swirled away and vanished over the course of several minutes. It left the Fallen, Spyra and the two Guardians in various states of disarray among all the dead Apes and dragon bones littering the plaza.

The Fallen saw Spyra's purple head rise up inquisitively from beside the pedestal as she peered around. When her eyes tore off of him and landed on the chalice-carve, she let out a gasp when she saw that the Siphoning Crystal had vanished, and the blue glow emanating around the pedestal had subsided completely.

"Is everyone alright?" Ignitia called, grunting and coughing as she stood herself up.

"That bitch!" Spyra barked, leaping to her feet, and clawing at the chalice bowl. She leaned over it and stuck an eye inside, comically searching for any sign of the crystal. "She took the rock thingy!"

The Fallen waited for his HUD to stop flashing as all the emergency and warning runes filtered away, his suit's systems fully restoring to their normal guise. He checked the motion tracker, gawking when he saw Cynder's life signs still in the immediate area.

He spun around and gazed across the aqua-lit chamber. On the other side, back towards the tunnelway they had come in from, Cynder was a tiny black ant on wings that swooped through the frozen snowfall of Spirit Mana pebbles and the array of floating islands. She didn't even glance back as she nimbly dived and vanished into the archway of the tunnel. He could see the crystal, even from this distance, glowing a vibrant sapphire from where it was clenched in her paw.

There was no use chasing her. Cynder had gotten what she wanted.

"_Cyrila!_" Ignitia bounded across the body-strewn plaza, Terradora slowly trudging up behind her.

The poor Fire Guardian was so overwhelmed post-combat that tears were falling from her eyes. She scrambled over the chin of the cold pedestal, her paws clenching loudly over one of the chain-links holding down the blue dragoness. After a few pained yanks, the chains groaned against the loop they were stuck through. Ignitia yipped when the lock-band flashed white, and the chains seemed to constrict even tighter against all explanation.

In her stupor, Cyrila moaned in torment and wriggled underneath the rattling links.

"The locks are enchanted." Ignitia gasped.

"I can't believe it! We found the Guardian of Ice, man!" Spyra bounded back and forth on the other side of the pedestal, her eyes sweeping over Cyrila's spined back. "Huh, it's too bad Cynder slipped her a roofie or something, else I'duv' said yo to her. How do we get her out?"

"Give me a minute, I can break the seals." Ignitia glanced over her wings. "Terra', Fallen, come here please. Terra': grab this link. When I tell you to, I need you to break it."

"I'll take the other one." The Fallen jumped over Cyrila's chained tail and picked up the chains on the opposite side. "Just tell me when to break it."

"…Erm… Fallen, I have to imagine that Terradora is much more capable of that feat." Ignitia blinked at him.

"Yes, quite. Do stay back, tiny thing, I would not wish for you to get a shard of shrapnel in your eye." Terradora glared at him. "Unless you are volunteering."

"_Terra'._"

"Ahem." The Fallen wriggled his gauntlet's fingers. "I think you'd be surprised at what I can normally achieve."

"Yeah, I saw that." Spyra chimed. "He caved an Ape's head in with his fist. This alien space-suit of his is the shit."

"Hmmph." Terradora snorted, the chains clinking as she clenched a fist over the loop-band. "We shall see."

Ignitia laid a paw over the band, her eyes closed as she murmured a series of indiscernible words. Everybody could feel a slight tingle in the air from the presence of a more offensive magic. Despite a moment of tense uncertainty, the results were undeniable soon thereafter.

"_Now!_" Ignitia let the loop go.

Terradora grunted, and jolted both of her forepaws back.

**_CRSSH-ringinging…_** -The chain shattered, sending fat shards ringing about the floor in all directions. Cyrila slumped with just a bit of laxness in her stupor, her right forearm now loose underneath the defeated bands that had remained solid.

"Good work." Ignitia brushed Terradora's flank as she bounded to the next loop by the Fallen. "Now grab that one and wait for me. Fallen: when I tell you to, yank, _hard._"

"You got it."

"Ignitia, allow me to do the work, this alien cannot possibly manage-"

Terradora's words were sucked out of her mouth when Ignitia gave the go, and the Fallen snapped the chain-links free with _one hand,_ scattering the glittering shards all over.

The human tossed the sorry-looking links like they were a dead serpent still clenched in his fingers. He glanced at Terradora and chuckled when he saw her turning almost as red as Ignitia was naturally.

"Your turn, Guardian." He pointed at the next loop.

"_Now!_" Ignitia declared.

Eventually, the last of the links were sloughed away. Ignitia tore free a few more lines and gripped Cyrila's now exposed flank, rocking the dragoness in panic.

"_Ohnononono-_" –She kept mumbled over and over. "-_Wakeupwakeupwakup._"

"Ignitia," The Fallen tapped a few runes on the console protruding from his right forearm. Instead of the energy blade casting free, a small needle poked out from a previously unseen port beneath the vent. "let me help her. She looks hurt, badly."

"You will not touch her." Terradora reached out to clasp the Fallen's arm, but thought better of it, and merely left her paw hanging there with the claws unsheathed and still dripping with Ape blood. "Back off, alien."

"If only you did what you were going to do." The Fallen sighed with disappointment as he eyed her talons. "I have regenerative solutions inside the suit. Unlimited supplies of it too, we don't need to worry about the syringe packs."

"He's used it on me a few times, it's just to fix the damage." Spyra said sternly. "C'mon Terradora, Cyrila's face looks broken and there's gotta' be, like, a million slashes all over her."

"It certainly _looks_ like Cynder apprehended her against her will." Ignitia bit her lower chop as she rubbed her paws tenderly on Cyrila's shoulder. "Yes, Fallen, just do it quickly. My healing magicks will take longer to work."

"You allow this?" Terradora gawked at her.

"Spyra's right: it works, I've witnessed it." Ignitia shook her head. "Calm down, Terra', the Fallen is on our side, even if he does not always appear to be so."

"It'll take just a second." The Fallen knelt and aligned the needle with a clear patch of scales on Cyrila's flank. He took a second to look at the dragon, her features halfway between serene and pained as she lay helpless below them all.

She was actually pretty hot, no pun intended. She had hips almost as lethal as Spyra's.

But not Cynder. Somehow, nobody in this joint was rocking the same boat she was. He was okay with that, strangely enough.

Gingerly, he slipped the needle up to the halfway point into her flesh, waiting as he watched his HUD inside the helmet. His suit's systems appropriated her vitals both from a brief blood sample and from the scans on his motion detectors. The exact right amount of regen-injection passed through and into Cyrila's bloodstream. The Fallen retracted the needle, sterilizing it with a small jet of purple flame dancing out from the vent-port.

"Toxin report is clean. There were some fractures, some breaks and moderate blood loss. She'll need to be hospitalized regardless when we get her out." He mumbled to Ignitia. "She's dehydrated too. I can give her some of my suit's water supply-"

"You've done enough." Terradora snarled, ripping a canteen off Ignitia's sash. "We take care of our own."

"Thank you, Fallen." Ignitia bumped him in the temple with her snout, surprising him. She cooed a second later in fascination at the feel of the synthetic metal, reaching up to swivel a thumb-pad on the edge of his visor. "This will most likely take some getting used to. But it isn't an unwelcome sort of change. I've been curious as to your normal, ah… _getup,_ I think is what the hatchlings these days would say."

"I can deal with that." He smiled.

"Watch the paws there, grams'." Spyra said, annoyed, as she stood on her hinds and swatted at Ignitia's claw.

"Is she alright?" Colcrus shouldered past the Fallen, leaning close as Terradora cradled Cyrila's head and eased her mouth open for the canteen. "Oh, Ancestors, is she-"

"She is breathing." Terradora grunted. "Wake up, sister. The time is now."

"Don't be too forceful, Terra', she's had a rough day." Ignitia mumbled, her eyes gluing to the various injuries across the Ice Guardian's body as they reknitted themselves and slowly began to disappear, aside from dried blood spatters and lines.

"Wake up, please." Terradora frowned.

Cyrila drooled a bit and her neck draped loosely. She looked like a rubber-chicken hung over a ledge.

With an impatient huff, Terradora squinted an eye at Ignitia, and then proceeded to completely tip the canteen over and dump the contents over Cyrila's face with a hearty splash.

"_Terra'!_" Ignitia whined.

"-_*pfffft* -AGH-! *pfffft* W-What- Where-?!_" A new voice to the party choked and sputtered.

"It worked, did it not?" Terradora rumbled, smirking as she shoved the canteen back into Ignitia's paw.

"Cyrila? Speak to me. Are you well?" Ignitia held the hen's face.

"-W-Where am I? …I… I-Ignitia?" Cyrila's eyes were a striking crystal blue. The Fallen hadn't even conversed with her yet and he was already lost in them. She had possibly the prettiest eyes he'd seen here so far, maybe even prettier than Morinth's. "-I-I can't… I can't remember how I… Wait a minute… I'm _wet_. Ancestors, I'm soaked, and I'm hurt, and- and I'm stuck out in the wilderness! The awful, dirty, unsanitary and disorganized _wilderness! _I demand an explanation at once!"

"She's fine." Terradora rolled her eyes. "Luckily I did not humor a good amount of worry in the first place."

"Yeah, sure, the panic in your voice there earlier didn't say nothin'." Spyra winked.

"_Terradora?_ What in the world are you doing here? Where are my dragons? What of Oversight? And what of that harlot _Cynder?_" Cyrila wriggled, kicked and thrashed, sending the whole party backwards to give her room as she flopped onto her feet. " _-AahaAGH-! _Afford me some _space_ if you all would! The gall!"

"Lady Cyrila, you're okay!" Colcrus cheered. "I was so worried."

"Colcrus." Cyrila harrumphed, righting herself and sticking her snout up at the party as her tail whipped and her wings shimmied off stray snow-dust. She still hadn't noticed Spyra or the Fallen yet in her haze of indignified, embarrassed grief. "Relay the situation to me this instant. I demand elaboration."

"W-Well, ma'am, at the mountain pass, Cynder and a flight of Wyverns ambushed us, and-"

"Get to the point."

"-we lost." Colcrus wing-shrugged. "You were taken by Cynder up into the Crystal Tombs of Chrysalis, and, well, we all came up here to save you."

"Hmmph. I should hope a pair of Guardians and a loyal soldier of the ranks could handle such a task." Cyrila fluffed her wings. "A tiring evening indeed."

"Don't you remember anything?" Ignitia pointed to the chalice-crop. "The Siphoning Crystal?"

"Crystal?" Cyrila blinked. "What crystal? Talk sense, Ignitia, will you?"

"Jeez', you were right, she really is an uppity bitch." Spyra scoffed out loud. The Fallen slapped a gauntlet over his visor.

"Those first impressions of yours are to be a long-lasting headache." Terradora grumbled. "Behold, our extended group of '_allies'._"

"'Sup." Spyra inclined her chin.

"Hello hello." The Fallen waved cheaply.

Cyrila looked like she was about to shit herself.

"-T-T-The P-P-P-Purple Dragon-" She sputtered.

"We can talk more once we get back to the city." Ignitia said. "We should make haste also. Now that we know what Cynder is up to, I fear that Volteera's time left is even shorter."

* * *

{🐉}


	38. Chapter 37 - Three Guardians

**Dragon(s)layer**

**37**

* * *

**Three Guardians**

* * *

**_{Mechassault OST: Tundra Theme}_**

* * *

Whoever said the challenge was always in _climbing_ the mountain had obviously never traveled to the Dragon Realms. Between the time it took for the Fallen, Spyra, Colcrus and the Guardians to defeat Cynder's army, release Cyrila, and go back the way they came, the blizzard had buried all evidence as to their prior passage from one end of the pass to the other.

Even the bodies. None were left to prove to Cyrila the viciousness of the fighting that had to be undertaken to save her life.

Though, she probably wouldn't even have processed any of it, from boasting to finger-pointing to recollection. She was too busy gawking and mourning over the, in quote- '_Terrible atrocities' _–that had been done to her hide and her beautiful scales. Oh, and the _talons._ She was pretty upset about those too. There were times where they had to stop walking and nag the astute Guardian of Ice to keep pace, because she had stopped somewhere along the path to gnaw at the scuffs in her nails or to whine and moan as she plucked out pebbles and rinds of dirt.

And then, whenever she wasn't causing her complaints to echo around the peaks, she was staring at Spyra and the Fallen. She didn't even bother to acknowledge that Colcrus had come all this way in his efforts to rescue her, or that he even had survived the ambush in the Solemn Pass to begin with.

"This was not a proper introduction at all." Cyrila's accent was peculiar to the Fallen. It reminded him of some prior civilizations he'd encountered, mostly on the various renditions of _Earth,_ a planet not too dissimilar from these realms. "I was never one to hold any amount of stock in those ridiculous fairy tales about glitter, fireworks and a grand entrance of some mysterious hero-figure, but I could've at least been warned in advance."

"You were chained to the ground having the life sucked out of you." Terradora rolled her eyes as she soldiered through the calm flurries of snow. Luckily, the blizzard had lowered to a whisper as they neared the end of the mountainous pathways. "My mind would lie in gratitude, much less insult."

"Oh, humbug to it all, Terradora. My day's been too long to listen to humbleness and piety." Cyrila huffed, preening her purple wings for the millionth time so she could crane the joint over and nibble at it. "Especially from _you,_ no offense."

"Taken." Terradora growled.

"Isn't there supposed to be a _none_ before that?" Colcrus chimed in the back of the procession.

"_No._" The Earth Guardian snapped over a particularly loud shriek of winter wind. "And I am tired of this blasted snow! It aches my wounds and rouses my temper! Ancestors damn this place."

"Ancestral burial grounds?" Colcrus harrumphed, insulted. "You all sure seem to not care a lot about the feelings of an Ice who happens to be here too."

"I'm just happy to see that you're safe and sound." Ignitia affectionately nuzzled Cyrila's neck, earning a click from the Ice Dragoness' tongue.

"_Please,_ Ignitia, don't smother me." She mumbled.

"Indeed. It would be a shame if you caught whatever she has." Terradora quipped to the Fire Guardian.

"Intellect and grace if nothing else." Cyrila tastefully absorbed the blow with a flex of her chiseled, blue brow. "Or were you trying to be insidious? Because I could hardly tell."

Terradora snarled over her wing.

"There's no need for harsh words, both of you." Ignitia nudged between the other Guardians. "Today is a momentous day! We're all together, and we've beaten the enemy once again. That's something to be grateful for."

"If only the victims of Cynder's Necromancy spells could say the same." Colcrus sighed. "All those tombs…"

"Colcrus, I realize that you endangered your own life to free me from my unfortunate placement, but I must say: it'd be most helpful to my mood if you kept the complaining to a minimum." Cyrila huffed, her snout raised to the sky in yet _another_ sign of indignation. "Honestly, can't any of you afford me some peace? Besides, I take no offense of my own, _Terradora,_ at the remarks made to these mountains. My father is buried back there, and he was an _asshole_, pardon my language. These peaks have little of anything that I love, and I am very eager to leave them behind."

"Always the same." Terradora scoffed. "Blaming everyone else around you for your own prudeness. How instinctual it must be for you."

"It isn't my fault the average drake lacks a suitable I.Q." Cyrila smiled with venom, oblivious as Colcrus blinked a few times to make sure he'd heard correctly.

"I was not even speaking of that."

"Oh, now you're defending them? It could be argued they're the reason I'm out in these dirty mountains soiling my paws in the first place."

It was a good thing the wind chose that moment to howl again, for it covered up the snort from underneath the Fallen's helmet. Spyra turned to him over her wing, and silently mouthed '_BITCH' –_to which he only offered a slight nod.

"I woke up this morning much less than I currently am, even after all that's happened." Ignitia butted between the other Guardians, trying her hardest to remain the voice of positivity. "And I can say the same for Terradora, and even Spyra and-" She glanced at the Fallen, only coughing before continuing. "-my point is, is that we have a lot to be grateful for. _Cyrila,_ you are safe, and relatively unharmed, and for that, I am so thankful."

"Yes, yes, quite." Cyrila glared for a moment longer at Terradora before killing the disagreement with a quiet huff. She probed at the side of her snout with a wingtip curiously." …Yes, relative. Compared to what Cynder did to me before my capture, this is quite acceptable. Your healing talents have only grown, Ignitia. I praise that."

"Ah, _well,_" Ignitia cleared her throat, again letting her eyes dart to the Fallen. "-I wasn't the one who treated your wounds, actually."

"Hm? Is that so?" Cyrila blinked. "Then it is obviously the Purple Dragoness I should be thanking."

"-_Oof~!_" –The Fallen hacked as Cyrila spun about, and clipped him dead-center the chest with her tail without even realizing. He landed in the slushy snow with a dim _puff_ and vanished from sight.

"Your talents are many, it seems." Cyrila studiously examined Spyra below her own snout, even though the purple beastess was struggling to contain a fresh fit of giggles. "You have my thanks, for both the participation in the battle and the application of aid."

"Application of what now?" Spyra stammered, tearing her eyes off where the Fallen had gone. It was like she was just realizing Cyrila had been speaking to her in the first place. "I didn't sign no application, lady, let's just clear the fog now."

"What might I call you?"

"Oh, well, the name's Spyr-"

"-I am Cyrila, Guardian of Ice, and commander of the Warfangian military." Cyrila interrupted, briefly holding out a blue paw, and quickly retracting it before Spyra could even reach to touch it. "So you are then the Purple Dragoness of legend, as the prophecies said you would be. Excellent: we shall begin to teach you the properties of my Element as soon as we are able. Now, I know the journey is long and the days not-so-immediate, but I will warn you: to learn Ice, is to do battle with your own inner-"

"She knows Ice already." Terradora spat over her flank. "She throws almost as many Icicles as she does profanities."

"_Did she just say I talk too much?!_" Spyra snarled, her temper flaring.

"…Is that so?" Cyrila glanced at Ignitia, who nodded profusely a few times.

"Uh, yes, Cyrila, Spyra has attained a fair degree of knowledge without our teachings, but-" Ignitia coughed.

"If not you or the Purple Heroine, than whom has alleviated me of these terrible afflictions? It couldn't have been Terradora. Trying to medicinally teach her would be like tutoring a brick."

"Having a head of stone certainly at its best beats having a head of brittle _glass._" Terradora shot back. "Throw a rock at ice: one shatters, I'll leave you to guess which."

"Guilty as charged." The Fallen grunted, his armor's joints whining minutely as he stood up, snow tumbling free of his purple and black plating. He gave a two-fingered salute and stepped closer. "You're welcome, by the way."

"-_Fallen,_ please." Ignitia quickly lashed a wing out to stop him even before he could think about offering a hand. Though, from what he'd seen, even if Ignitia hadn't been so keen, he doubted Cyrila would've dared touch him.

Especially with the way she was looking at him.

"_Yeesh-_" Conscience flinched, standing by his side. "And I thought the dirt-one was giving us the stink eye. She looks like someone offered her a wad of chewed gum or something."

"I wish I could drown you in the snow." The Fallen muttered under his helm.

"What extant species is _that?_" Cyrila crinkled her snout, her gaze darting from his boots to his headwear. "And what in the world is it wearing?"

"Tough luck today, boi'." Spyra sniggered, lazily trotting around Cyrila and brushing against the Fallen's hips like a cat. "It's armor, sister, ain't ya' ever seen some before?"

"And I'm a _he,_ thank you." The Fallen shivered as he unclipped his helm, briefly sliding it off to offer Cyrila another of his cheap grins. "_Brrrggghhh~._" He mumbled, brushing snowflakes off his face before replacing the helm. "I'm the Fallen, for I am nameless."

"Damn straight, and there ain't no _me_ if there ain't a _him_ with me." Spyra nodded. "He's just as mad a fighter as I am, probably madder, now that he's got this wicked-ass setup here."

"I can hold my own." He shrugged his pauldrons. Colcrus puffed his chops and pawed awkwardly at the snow, some utterance of exasperation whispering into the winter wind. "Still not a complete set yet."

"Oh gods, you're telling me there is _more?_" Terradora groaned. "Do me a liberty, and end me now."

"Stop that silly talk." Ignitia clicked her tongue. "The Fallen has proven himself just as capable of helping us end this war as Spyra has. We are a team, and we've been working together to stop the Dark Army. It'll be good to add your Element to our party, Cyrila. We need your help."

"…_By law aren't I obliged to give it regardless?_..." Cyrila muttered, still looking at the odd pairing of the Fallen and Spyra. She blinked. "What of Oversight? The battle raged in the fullest when I was taken."

"The siege was broken, and Urukal's army lies in ruin." Terradora said. "And that miserable little queen still remains locked away in her quarters."

"Lilith took part in the beginning phases of the battle." Ignitia nodded. "She and her court guard took… _significant_ losses, and I don't quite think she's recovered from the fallout."

"_Bah,_ she's a coward, nursing some mental affliction of little value in that throne of hers." Terradora sneered. "Pathetic and weak, as no queen should be."

"She still has not emerged?" Cyrila cocked her head. "Has anyone been past the doors to the throne room?"

"I, briefly, to call for aid." Terradora looked towards the way they had been headed. "She stank of residual moping and self-pity, and I don't just mean that figuratively."

"Well, before that disastrous episode at the Solemn Pass, I had been briefed on the situation of the city myself." Cyrila fluffed her wings. "Volteera and I had answered Lilith's personal plea for help. I doubt she's given you the specifics that she had afforded us."

"Specifics?" Ignitia blinked.

"Oh yes, she told you nothing indeed." Cyrila sighed tiredly, resuming her trot through the snow. "Come come, we still have one more challenge to defeat today, much to my chagrin."

* * *

{🐉}

"Whaz it look like ta you?"

"**_Meep._**"

"That's what I thought. Bloody burglars and their heathenryness and whatnot. I'll clean his clock I will, rank bastard."

Palmet had already combed the entirety of the first floor of the Guardian Temple with Meep, and up until now, there had been no other signs of foreign entry after they had discovered the broken window.

But Meep had been quick to point out that in one of the subsidiary ways off the foyer chambers, there were tiny shards of glass, and more importantly, there were some faint indications of _footprints._

Or rather _pawprints._

A dragon.

The intruder was a dragon. Palmet almost dropped the shiv he'd gathered up from that stupid vase.

It was likely that whoever it was didn't know he was here, which was more of a problem than a good thing, because dragons (as far as he was sure, anyway) –had pretty much culture-coded all their generations to kill his kind on sight.

And if anything over the last few days could prove smack for tap: generally, one-on-one fights between Apes and dragons were won by a particular party. At least, when the Apes were smaller and less ferocious than the officers. Palmet didn't have the guts of an officer, and he certainly didn't have the brawn or wit of a Commander. There was a reason those guys were the only ones Cynder gave enchanted weapons to.

The footprints led in circles for awhile, to parts of the temple he and Meep hadn't checked yet. Though these were few, it reminded Palmet that the Guardian Temple was in actuality a pretty big place. Ignitia had been adamant of him staying away from the lower chambers, but after a while, his janitorial effectiveness whittled away her suspicions.

And frankly, he didn't blame her for letting her guard down.

This fucking place had become a pig-stye. Dust, grime, even some mold in the lower catacomb tunnels had overrun the higher shelves and the floors. Honestly, he was surprised the whole campus hadn't come undone without a proper janitor.

"Looks like dey broke in a night ago it does." Palmet stooped down and ran his finger through one of the dirty pawprints, humming as he tested the granular muck between his pointy and thumb. "Dis dirt's old, eh?"

"**_Meep?_**" The little sewer-octopus on his shoulder squeaked.

"Yeah, yer right, I should probably be a bit more cautiousness dere." Palmet did the smart thing, taking Meep's advice, and popped the dirty finger in his mouth, swishing the taste about for a few seconds before swallowing. "Eh, it ain't _dat _old I guess. Certainly not swamp-dirt it aint, that stuff tends ta be more mucky and whatnot, ah, and it tastes a bit like shrooms all da time it does."

"**_Meep?_**"

"Nah, yer thinkin' uv the wrong testers there, the corpse-quality-checkers had to do them uns good. Needed much more finga-werk back den."

Down the stairs the prints led, to the archway of the chamber.

The chamber with the Pool.

"…Aye…" Palmet grumbled, standing at the top of the flight with a look of hesitation scrunching up his face. "I don't like dat room much meself. Got the heebee-jeebies evva since that nutcase who likes the bouldas gave us a piece-a her mind."

"**_Meep?_**"

"Yeah, I don't know what a burgla would want with the nasty drag pool thingy either."

Quietly, the Ape slunk down the steps, the dim illumination from the chamber shining in a wide cone that blared the bottom of the flight in contrast to the murky shadows. He noted that the light wasn't just from the braziers inside. It was pink-hued, and occasionally wavering.

The Pool! The intruder must be using it.

"**_Meep-!_**"

Palmet plugged Meep's beak with a dirty finger, shushing him as he tiptoed to the archway.

"…_well I think what you two have is so beautiful, and sincere. You can't let a thing like this jeopardize that._" –A faint, low-leveled and feminine voice echoed from beyond the pillar-struct. Palmet compressed to one side in the dark, and carefully peeked around the corner, Meep propping himself on top of his narrow head to see too. "_I don't think after everything you've told me, I could believe that her character would be anything but enamored with you. Oh, you both are so lucky._"

"N-Not really, I… I don't think so." Taliopia huffed, pawing at the floor as she looked away from the shimmering projection standing between her and the very active Pool. She brought a wing around to nibble at the joint as she talked. "It's always been so complicated, and hard, and I… I haven't been as mature as I've needed to be. I've been a coward, and a snot-nosed brat."

"That's nonsense!" A green, yellow-bellied dragoness stomped her foot, making to step closer, even though she physically was not there. "Taliopia, Morinth was saying those things to support and defend you! She just didn't say it the right way."

"S-She said it perfectly." Taliopia snuffed, wiping at dried tears underneath her eyes. "She just can't bear to tell me the truth, which is that she can't stand being lassoed with me, and that she wishes she could move on. Because all I have to offer her is my whining, and my crying, and my horrible parents w-who _hate_ her, a-and I hate them, and-"

"Taliopia, no, no you have it all wrong." Queen Lilith chuckled, spreading her red wings to demonstrate a broader horizon. "You're not looking at the big picture. The day you find a mate that is absolutely perfect is _not_ the day you find _the one, _the one you'll spend the rest of your life with. There are supposed to be flaws. If you try to find something like this without them, it just isn't realistic. It's your job to better each other's weaknesses, be the other half! You know?"

"W-What weaknesses do I help a dragoness like _Morinth_ overcome, huh?" Taliopia sniffled. "She's brave, and fast, and she has the thickest skin I've ever seen in anyone before. Morinth figured out life in more ways than I ever will…"

"All that thick skin and bravery never taught her how to be compassionate." Lilith shook her head. "_You_ did that. She wouldn't be the same, especially now if you don't fix this. Both of you, I mean."

"But-"

"No _buts._" Lilith giggled. "Take it from a dragon who wasted the chance of such a close relationship herself. Taliopia, you and Morinth will make it better. You just have to try, and I'm confidant you'll figure it out sooner rather than later."

"But we've only been talking for two days." Taliopia shyly smiled.

"And so much I have learned of you both in those two days." Lilith beamed. "So much have you helped _me_ through all of this, with me, and my being here, and… and all the people I've failed."

"You still have time to fix your own problems too." Taliopia shifted on her haunches, her rosy eyes beaming in the chamber's pinkish shade. "And I thought I had it hard. You lost all those dragons. I don't blame you for locking those doors to your throne room."

Queen Lilith's response started as a quiet laugh, but then her jaw quivered, and she had swallowed the rest of it as an air-starved gasp.

"T-That isn't the only reason I'm here right now." Her voice cracked. "A-And I know what my people think. They think I'm a coward, a-and a failure, and a shadow of what my mother once was."

"_I'm_ the coward, Lilith."

"No! No Taliopia, you are not!" Lilith exclaimed. "You're the one on the front lines, risking your scales, doing battle with the Dark Army! I tried but once and was crushed, and now I can't even wake up in the morning anymore without knowing how much I've destroyer, never to be remade again!"

"I think we both have to work on the pity-parties." The medic bowed her snout, humbled.

"…I wish you had brought Morinth with you this time, like you did the first." Lilith forced a smile. "All three of us probably had advice for the others that would've helped all the more. You're both so intelligent."

"_Us?_ Coming from the Lady of the Realm of Vines…" Taliopia blushed. "_You're_ the one who's amazing, Lilith. I don't care what anyone says about you. You're fighting your own war in that throne room. Why, if it wasn't for you, the whole province would be-"

"Aye! Bugga all's that swell, ya almost gave me a heart-attakk ya did there, miss-drag-lady!" Palmet guffawed, his Apish mass waddling out from his hiding spot and into the chamber. "I thought yous was a burglar or sum kinda jewely thief or whatnot! What a releaf dat turned out ta be, eh? Have ya seen the Master anywhere? I gots ta show him me new cleanin technique I do-"

"**_An Ape-!_**" Lilith and Taliopia both squealed.

"Run, Taliopia!" The Queen panicked.

"Run?! From wha?!" Palmet gripped his chest, swinging around to stare in horror back at the stairwell behind him. "I knew it! There really _is_ a burgla on da grounds! Stay behind meh miss-drag-lady! I'll protect ya with me wits and musclyness I will!"

"**_Meep…_**" Meep rolled his eye.

"_No~!_" Taliopia cried, fighting through the tremors forcing themselves through her limbs. She stood her ground, cementing her feet to the floor, and bowing her snout as to bear her fangs and preen her wings. "No, I'm done running! I'll be brave. I'll _kill you,_ servant of Malefora!"

"Waitamintherenow-" Palmet quirked a brow. He didn't have time to voice a complaint about the obvious falsities of his service, however.

Taliopia leaped at him, claws unsheathed, with her teeth aimed for his throat.

* * *

{🐉}

They landed on the walls of Castle Crownhorn in record time. With most of their forces destroyed, Cynder, Chieftain Jute, and the handful of stragglers left had vanished into the mountains, beaten and bleeding (for the most part) –and would no doubt be back at a later date for revenge.

Folks gathered all around the party from the moment they touched down. Dragons and Moles alike gawked at the Fallen's armor and now much more imposing presence. They also couldn't believe that Guardian Cyrila was not only alive, but relatively unscathed and safely back within the city. Cheers were largely absent, but some applause sounded out once and awhile from tired droves of infantrymen and civilians. Ignitia's coughing had gone away completely by now, so she was able to call out for clear paths as the party moved on.

Though, mostly this was to warn people about being run over by Terradora more than it was to make their walk easier. The Guardian of Earth was still fuming from the events that had transpired in the tomb. She stomped at the head of the party with a reckless gait, almost stepping on a few Moles who weren't quick to jump aside.

"It isn't what you think it is. Or _thought_ it was." Ignitia muttered, drawing alongside her. "The Fallen is no traitor, and the situation is the most unique I have seen: something for only once in a lifetime. I'm not asking you to protect him, or me, or anyone else. But if this becomes louder than it already has, I don't need to tell you about the chaos it will sew."

"What more can we do to wound these lands?" Terradora's stone voice grumbled out. "You lied to me, Ignitia. There is much more to the Fallen than I was initially led to believe."

"You wished not to hear of any details!" Ignitia incredulously stammered. "I understand that Spyra and the Fallen haven't exactly melded well with you through their own charisma, but Terra', this goes beyond how we all personally feel for one another."

"You wish to speak of _feelings?_" Terradora got in her face, her words lowered to a staccato tremor that seemed to come from the floor beneath their heels. "Withholding from me is something I can respect, but have you thought of _yourself_ lately? How you look at the Fallen? I know that light in your eyes, Ignitia. I know it as all adults do from their years of hormonal adolescence."

Ignitia was taken aback, her tongue clicking in an expression of exasperated gall.

"_Terra'._" She gasped.

"Do not '_Terra' _me, Ignitia." Terradora snapped. "I have been led these long years of my life with a certain kind of assurance: that to my back, I would never worry about the sail of betrayal or misstepping, not even once, not from _you._ And now, I reunite with you after a long campaign, and _this_ is where you have fallen to?"

"Did someone call me?" The Fallen asked over Spyra's head.

"Shut your tiny fucking mouth." Terradora's face lit with uncontained rage.

"Excuse me, _no,_" Ignitia harrumphed, positioning herself between Terradora and the human. She moved her snout just an inch from the other Guardian's, cowing Terradora for a moment. "no I believe this discussion was between you and me."

"Indeed." Terradora growled, trying to use her larger size in a way she normally reserved for strangers. It wounded Ignitia deeply, but the Guardian of Fire was quick to contain her emotions on it. "So then tell me, sister, what is this? Have you tired of the code? Our way of life? Or is this really the first moment of true weakness you've reduced yourself to in front of me?"

"I have risked my life, my view of the world and the stability of my heart to get to this point, all within the rigid boundaries of our traditions, with the usual unofficial levity we've always gifted one another, off the books, of course." Ignitia sternly explained. "A moment of _weakness?_ What is it you suggest? That I've somehow gotten younger, or that I have become ignorant? Because either is quite an insulting path for even _you_ to take."

"Even me!" Terradora barked, earning some stares around the hallway they had been trekking down. "Do not turn this around!"

"Turn _what_ around?" Ignitia snapped. "I've offered you nothing but love, compassion and understanding, things that I might add very few before me have even _considered_ affording you!"

"How dare you."

"How dare I, Terra'? How _dare I?_ No, Terra', how dare _you. _You have the gall to abandon us for a job fate never meant for you to have, chasing ghosts nobody in the world cares about, all the while pushing away everyone and everything that attempts to rip you from this drunken, stubborn, obsequious nonsense that you've clouded your taciturn and frankly single-minded head with! And you've done it for almost _twenty years!_ And now, you want to speak to me about _wholesomeness? _Legitimacy? Oh no, Terradora, it is not _me_ who's horns are at risk here of being brushed away, it is _yours._"

Terradora was tremoring so much that the floor might've soon started to crack under her paws. She was so angry that a draining, dark energy radiated around her like an energy-sapping, fear-inducing cloud. The Fallen, Spyra, Colcrus and Cyrila watched the exchange with varying reactions. Spyra was half-amused, half-concerned, the Fallen had gone blank, Colcrus looked terrified and Cyrila looked exhausted.

"-I-If I did not care for you the way I do-" Terradora utterly trembled with rage, her words hissing through gritted fangs. "-W-Which I now see is a _mistake-_"

"How mature of you to say." Ignitia snarled.

"I never needed you." Terradora snapped, jamming a talon into the other hen's chest. "Twenty years and you still can't figure out how not to waste your breath."

"_Go. Away._" Ignitia quivered.

"_Gladly._"

The whole party (and a number of spectators) flinched when Terradora tore away and stalked down the hall, her tail-mace crashing into a wall and leaving a ruined gash in its wake. Bits of brick were still clambering away on the floor by the time she vanished around a corner.

"I wasn't even in on the scoop," Spyra muttered. "-but _man_ is she a bitch. Why do we need her again?"

"Such disrespect." Cyrila half-heartedly craned a brow at her.

"You'll get used to it." The Fallen sighed. "Are you alright, Ignitia?"

"I'm fine." Even though her face was as animated as if she had said it loudly, the words only came out as a hoarse, muted croak. She shivered out a breath and rose to her feet, gesturing for Cyrila. "You spoke of trouble with the Queen of Oversight?"

"Aye." Cyrila nodded. "It might be replenishing if you sat this one out."

"No." Ignitia grunted. "I'll go crazy without the work."

"This might not be the proper kind of work, therapeutically, I mean." Cyrila grumbled as she examined bits of soil still clinging to her talons. "But, I did promise Lilith that me and the scatterbrain would take a look down there, if we all didn't die during the battle."

"Don't speak of Volteera that way." Ignitia dryly frowned. "She could be dead. Is that what it would take for you to stop being so mean to her?"

Cyrila opened her mouth to retort, but glanced at where Terradora had vanished to, and shut her chops silently.

"I did not mean insult, it's a bad habit." She calculated her words carefully. It couldn't be helped now that the dialogue had become a steaming hot iron juggled between all the participants. "It was a job for me and her, but then Cynder hatched another of her brilliant schemes and here we are…"

"That bitch should go squat and hatch an egg." Spyra rolled her eyes. "Seriously, all she's good for is making everything more and more friggin' difficult."

"She's a fighter." Colcrus nodded. "And a criminal."

"The tombs." Ignitia couldn't find it in herself to come up with more supportive words, she just said it and let it go with a displeased breath.

"Please speak not of it." Cyrila's eyes went glassy, and she took to staring at a wall, freezing up like her own Element.

"Aw shit, don't tell me _she's_ got PTSD too." Spyra scoffed, yanking on the Fallen's arm with her tail. "C'mon space-man, let's get cleaned up so we can get this done and over with. We're going in like a cave or something? Ya' said _down there_ before."

"It's a tunnel network, below the castle." Cyrila dragged a talon on the floor. "The Roseways. Queen Lilith claims something is down there."

"Do you believe her?" Ignitia asked.

"You don't feel the wrongness in the air too? Aside from all the terrible filth clogging my nose."

"I do." The Fire Guardian brushed Cyrila's flank as she passed. "I was just making sure."

* * *

{🐉}

"Why do I get the feeling that Ignitia's the _exception_ and not the rule? Every other Guardian we've found has been a grade-A cunt."

"Well, everything we're hearing about Volteera seems… nice."

"Ignitia talks about everyone _'nice'_, that's all she does. Nice nice _nice._ She's too nice, especially to that giant, walking, green lummox who's infected with a case of man-face." Spyra spat. "Makes me sick."

"What? Terradora's attitude or Ignitia's fluff?" The Fallen smirked.

"The first one. She doesn't deserve that shit, and she knows it, I know it, I bet even the prissy snow-wench knows it too. Didjya' see how she looked at her afterward? She knew that fight was a pile of stank, and she didn't want to get involved."

"Sounds like someone's concerned about Ignitia." The Fallen chuckled, hands wetly slipping down his cheeks as he banished a ream of creamy suds.

"And you _aren't?_"

Spyra asked the question honestly, no sarcasm intended, she even stopped scrubbing her paw. The Fallen paused and took a second to think about his answer.

"Of course." He eventually concluded, craning a leg over the marble rim. "We owe her a lot."

"Some more than others…" She clicked her tongue. "Ya' know those people you can never ever really do anything that'll come close to repaying what they did for you?"

"You mean good parents? No, I don't." The Fallen stepped out of the tub, water dripping from his limbs as he wrapped a towel over himself. He glanced around the guest room for some reason, suddenly feeling like he was being watched by someone other than her.

"Don't mind me, really, I'm always here no matter what. Y'know… being the same person and all." Conscience chuckled, legs kicking as he sat on top of one of the basin counters. "But I see what you mean, or feel, what I meant was _feel._"

"Hey, you alright there, bro?" Spyra hopped out of the tub like a dog, water dappling everywhere as she shook her meaty flanks and rinsed off the whole chamber. The Fallen chuckled and started re-drying off the areas he'd already gotten on himself. "You zoned out."

"I'm sorry."

"I asked about your ma' and pa'. You made it sound like they sucked major degree ass or somethin'." Spyra stole the towel blatantly from him with her mouth, and started working on the crevices of her wings. Her words were muffled past the fabric. "_Donbt tehl meh: dey gave u up fuhr adowpshun._"

"What? No." He smirked. "I just don't remember them. I don't really remember anything about who I was before I became a Portaljumper."

"_Pt-too~!_" Spyra spit the towel back at him and he caught it. "-That isn't like a side-effect of becoming one, is it? Memory loss or some other whack-shit?"

"Not that I'm aware of. Why?"

"Well, for, ya' know, when the war's over, and we beat Malefora." Spyra's sentence was weird. It started with the usual smug confidence she sported in her tone, and then it wavered five words in for a more sheepish uncertainty. It made her blush, much to her chagrin, so she spent a good deal of energy avoiding his gaze by fiddling with her now clean talons. "…Uh, _if_ we beat Malefora. W-Which we totally can!"

"Is this a question about the future?" The Fallen gave her the towel after finishing, going around her to grab the jumpsleave laid out nearby. "Because you know I'm not a fan of stating ultimatums when I haven't gotten to what they're meant for yet."

"I wasn't stating any ultimatums. _Yet._ I can't get by with too much assumin', it'll give me gas. It's a question about _us." _She wing-shrugged. "I finally got what I was looking for in my life. I got to see the Dragon Realms, go to Warfang, meet and befriend other dragons…" Spyra watched his back as he shimmied into the sleave. "…and I got a _mate_, and stuff…"

"_Hoho,_ been called that one before, hey, pops?" Conscience snap-pointed doubles. The Fallen chucked an unused body-sponge across the room, and it smacked into the wall where Conscience had been standing.

_Fucking asshole._

"-Pssh, _fine._" Spyra scoffed, giving him a glare before tossing the towel in the corner, her scales nice and dry. "Maybe it's something we _shouldn't_ talk about, eh? I guess you're still pissed that I told you I loved you."

"Nono, that isn't what I-" The Fallen groaned, following her out into the carpeted guest room. The dragon's face was twisted in the beginnings of what he knew was an angry grimace. "I already told you what I intend to do about this, about _us._ You'll have that choice, Spyra. If all goes as planned- or close to it, knock on wood –I want you to come with me, when I leave this realm."

"So that's why I'm askin'." Spyra shook her head, and flopped onto the sheets of the bed with a muffled thud. She twisted around like a cat preparing a perch and curled up, scrutinizing the human as he finished applying the sleave. "I want to know what the risks are if I go with you. You can't just ask a 'ness to leave behind her friggin' reality without givin' some kind of a crash-course, ya' big oaf."

"A crash-course? For _Portaljumping?_" The Fallen smiled at her as he stepped over to the corner of the room. He saw her glaring and held his hands up. "Right right, I'm sorry, you're just finding out about all of this, and you have the right to know."

"_Thankyou._" She gave him a smug wiggle of her shoulders as she kneaded the sheets. "When ya' put aside all the people you kill and the other 'nesses you've screwed, you're a keeper."

"Ah." He scratched his chin, noticing stubble there for the first time. _Huh, might have to ask Ignitia if Moles actually shave. I can't imagine any of the dragons own razers._ "It'd help if you had some specifics in mind."

"_Ohhhhh c'monnnnn…_" She groaned, rolling over and exposing her golden belly. Spyro frowned at him upside-down, hanging her horns off the edge of the bed. "It ain't much to ask for just a general tutoring and some attention."

"Okay, so do you mind if I armor-up and talk at the same time?"

On the floor was a small pile of folded metallic pieces. His suit, freshly decompiled as it had been in the pod, ready for use again. He picked up the breastplate and placed it over his chest, systems whirring as servo-links hooked up, and decompiled nano-reserves started to unfurl the support ribs that began to appear secured around his torso.

"As much as you may not want to hear it: the Portaljumping _is_ the crash-course. But if we're just sticking to immediate side-effects from leaping through an actual portal, then the answer's _no._ Nothing permanent like memory issues or deformations or anything."

"Aight', so at least I won't have to worry about a fifth leg sproutin' out my ass." Spyra harrumphed. "But there are _non-_permanent side effects?"

"Usually a person experiences mild to severe nausea, vertigo, dizziness, stuff like that for the first few jumps. After a while though your body gets used to it." The Fallen mused at her expression. Spyra's eyes hadn't stopped boggling every time he did something with the suit. She looked on- utterly fascinated –as the breastplate and cuirass of his armor finished fixing itself into place. With a final little hiss and electronic bleep, he let it be and started applying the grieves and leg plating. "Do you like the suit?"

"'_Like'_ ain't too definite a word for what I feel, but, uh… yeah, yeah it's cool as hell." Spyra put her purple chin in her paws, her gaze becoming more longing. "I did say I liked you a whole lot when you were all suited in that getup the Moles made for you."

"That had more _bling,_ I'll admit."

"Yeah, but I like this one better." She laughed, jumping a bit when the leg plating finished securing, and the nano-batches vanished into thin air with a pattern of minute clicks and metallic shifts. "What kind of magic is that? That makes the rest of it appear on you out of thin air like that?"

"Not magic: nanites." The Fallen clenched his fist as the last gauntlet finished securing itself. The suit hummed quietly as several little light-up slits across the plating began to glow a sickly neon green, and tiny portcullises lining the spinal structure turned light blue. "Millions of tiny artificially directed machines manipulating pounds of decompiled synthetic band-wrap metal."

"…Uh, bless you." She wiggled her nose.

"It just allows me to make the suit more portable, and it takes less time to prep then a traditional suit of armor would." He explained, stepping closer to hold out his plated arm for her to feel. "Though, there is _some_ magic involved. The suit's designed to rely on a hybridization of systems and technologies both digital, mechanical and runic. I need some magical capabilities to counter other people's magic."

Spyra hummed as she listened, running her paws up and down the darkly colored metal of the gauntlet. She briefly slipped her talons between his fingers, getting a sense of the banded plating protecting those too before squeezing lightly.

"When I saw you punch those Apes today, you caved in their skulls." Spyra muttered, sniffing at his gauntlet's knuckles. "How did you get so strong? You couldn't do that a day ago."

"Well, the-"

"-The suit gives you steroids, doesn't it?"

"…No." He chuckled. "It does enhance my physical abilities, but not through drugs or anything."

"How does that work?"

"I think you'd just say '_bless you' _–again, to be honest."

That satisfied her- at least for now –so she let it go with a little bob of her head.

"Lemme' see the other one." The dragon nodded at the right gauntlet, the one with the vent-port, and the little computer console he used as a command uplink.

The Fallen hesitated.

"Oh, this oughta' be good." Conscience puffed his lips, sitting beside her on the bed. "Just be _carreeeeffulllll…_"

"I-I don't think that's a good idea." He said, slowly retracting his arm from her. Spyra blinked, and then she pouted, even folding her forearms to make the point.

"I don't care if it's a good idea or it ain't, I wanna' see it." She cocked her head.

"Just because you're my smex-derg doesn't mean you get auto-yesses all the time, girlie."

"I betchya' you'd let me see it if I blew you again." The purple beastess licked her chops and winked. "That what you want, huh? To blow another batch of hatchlings down my dragony throat?"

The Fallen twitched.

**_Clink _**–quietly rang out from the suit's groin pad.

"Ouch." He mumbled. The suit was roomy, but dragon-induced boners were something even a spacious crotch-chamber couldn't contain properly.

"C'mon, really," Spyra giggled, the bedsprings squeaking as she hopped closer like a gazelle, and planted her paws on his hips. She gave him a lurid look, and soot crawled out of her snout. "I'm serious dude, hand that arm of yours over here for a bit, and I'll slurp your spear until you sound like someone gave ya' helium. All that fighting made me horny as fuck. No pun intended."

"W-While that sounds like the best idea I've heard all day, I-I really don't think it's safe for you to handle it. There's… _things_ installed in the suit that I'm not really willing to let you see yet, because-"

"Aw jeez', don't tell me one of those Apes hit you in the head hard enough for you to go gay." Spyra huffed, tearing to the flank, and reaching out for his arm in a swift movement. "-_Gimme'~!_"

"Nononono wait-" He stammered, trying and failing to rip his arm back. Spyra was one of the quickest fighters he'd ever met, so of course, even with the suit's aid, her reflexes bulldozed his into the pavement, and didn't even look back at the skidmark. "_Spyra, wait-_"

"I- just- wanna'- _look- at- it-!_" She snapped between yanks, her talons clicking as she hooked them on the divider breach between the two forearm panels. "_I- said- gimme'!-_"

The dragon growled and readjusted her grip, a paw flying forward and clapping down over the little glowing monitor and the vent-port.

**_Beep~! _**–went the console screen.

"-Ohnono_nowaitwaitWAITDON'T**TOUCHTHAT-!**_"

The Fallen was too late.

In a flash of neon-green light, the whole room was overcome with a thunderous crackle of ozone, and a colossal _bang~!_ –all enough for the poor Fallen to be knocked off his heels.

He clattered to the floor plated-ass-first, grunting as he slid and slammed into one of the dressers. Spyra yelped, literally being tossed off of the bed. She was wreathed in bands of white energy and green light that swirled around and clung to her scales.

The dragoness landed floor on the other side of the frame with a wooden _thunk,_ shaking the whole room to its very stone frame. The Fallen growled and shook his head, nursing a sore spot from where his cranium had smacked onto the edge of the dresser top.

"…Why is it always the head?" He grumbled under his breath.

"_Hello,_ forgetting something?!" Conscience knelt down and pointed. Green light illuminated the chamber from behind the bed, pulsing like a big, neon torch's flame to drown the whole room in sickly hues. It subsided a moment later, leaving nothing behind to show its vacancy other than a dull sizzling noise, and of course, the low and pained groans of a certain purple dragon.

"_Spyra!_" The Fallen cried, jumping to his feet, he ran around the foot of the bed. "Are you alright?! Spyra! Talk to m-"

"-_Ugh…. Fuck._" Spyra barked, shaking her head violently as she flopped over from where she had landed. "-_what the actual fuck-cakes did you do, man? Like… fuckin' ouch…_"

The Fallen's eye twitched as he watched the dragon roll off her side and sit up on the floor. She gave him a pouty look and snorted, a lick of flame extinguishing itself as quickly as it had appeared from her chops.

"Ya' just zapped your 'ness and you're not even gonna' help her up? I didn't know it was asshole-o-clock dude, jeez'…" She fluffed her wings, grunting as her joints crackled and popped. She started to stand up, and the Fallen almost tumbled back onto his rear for how panicked he was when he took the step back. "What's your problem? You're not the one who got thrown across the fuckin' room. What even _was_ that anyway? Some kinda' force-beam or something to knock bad-guys back? 'Cause it works, like, really good."

"….S-Spyra." The Fallen swallowed. She was just noticing that his arms were spread out on either side of himself, like he was making to form them in a basket to catch a baby tumbling off a ledge right over his head. "-Okay, j-just… just calm down, and understand that it isn't permanent. Do you hear me? It is _not _permanent."

"But you sure as hell _want_ it to be!" Conscience clapped his hands by the Fallen's side. "_Hot damn! _I don't think we've seen that successful a zap to the ladies since Berk."

"_Permanent?_ What's not permanent? The fuck are you blabbin' about? And why am I dizzy? What the fuck?…" Spyra growled.

"W-Watch your head-"

"Watch my head-? ***_bnk* _**_-OW~! _W-What the-?!" She gawked as her horn bounced off the curtain-top of the bed's luxurious frame. But the bump wasn't what had her.

The view of her elbow beside her face as she reached up to cup the site of impact made her freeze.

"…M-My arm. W-What happened to my arm?!" Spyra gasped. She held out her paws in front of herself and gazed at the insides of her thin forearms. The dragoness squealed in terror and jumped onto her feet.

Her _two_ feet.

"-Like I said, it isn't permanent-" The Fallen tried to control himself, and yet still he was turning into a shivering wreck as he took a step closer, his eyes unable to focus on her own, where they instead traveled much lower, past her chin. "-_I-It i-isn't… p-p-permanent…._"

"**_WHAT. THE. FUCK-?!_**" Spyra shrieked. She held out her arms, her upright, forward-backward bending arms, and screamed. Then, she peered past her chest, and saw a pair of taloned, purple dragon-foots holding her aloft via a pair of slender ankles, before two thick, curvaceous and rounded thighs plated with harder scaling towards her colossal hips. The waist shrunk and sloped like liquid metal into the box-like base of an abdominal daggering, leaving exposed a flat, softly paunched belly that was layered with thinly scuted golden plates, only breached at the very center for a winking naval depression.

Past that was the lean torso, and a duo of pointed, finely sloped shoulders birthing the lengths of two powerful, yet sleek arms.

But what really had her was the chest.

Or, rather, the things on her chest that were never there before.

"-W-What in **_god's name are these._**" She moaned in horror.

Spyra darted her hands up and clapped them loudly over the two golden, gelatinous masses of softly armored flesh hanging from past her clavicle to drape over the top of her abdominal region. The contact made her gasp as her palms roughly ground against a sensitive, brownly-colored nub that had spawned on the face of each globe. The poor dragoness had every color of the rainbow go across her face along with every expression as she dug her fingers in deep to the meldable, squishy tissue making the organs. She squeezed, yanked and rolled them about, half-fascinated half-terrified as the dough-like masses flopped about in her untrained grip.

"_-Fallen- F-Fallen, I-I shit you not- I am **fucking afraid right now. **_W-What the hell is happening? What did that fucking space-suit do to me? Huh?! I- I can't even-**_Oh my god._**" She squealed, looking down at the human's head past and _below_ the fleshy orbs. "-_You're supposed to be taller than me._"

Indeed he was.

At least, if biology here hadn't had its hand forced through artificial methods.

Now, upright, humanoid, standing almost seven feet tall and bedecked in one of the most outrageously bodacious physiques that the Fallen had ever laid eyes on, Spyra the Purple Dragoness saw the unfamiliar look of pure, unadulterated _starvation_ overcoming the Fallen's face.

He looked like a zombie.

The poor dragon squeaked and folded like a cheap lawnchair. She hugged her arms over her golden breasts, squishing them into her chest, their billowy masses leaking over the purple borders of her fores, where they sagged defiantly in a constant reminder of their existence. She curled her noticeably longer tail around her ankles and crossed her thighs. Spyra whimpered when she tried to flex her wings, and discovered that there was nothing to flex, aside from a sloping, curved and purple scuted back. There wasn't anything else she could do to curl up any more than she already had. She felt helpless, and oh-so confused, more so than she had ever been in her entire life.

"-_i-it's… it was an accident and- u-uhm…_" The floor pattered as literal drool flooded past the Fallen's lower lip and dripped down his chin. One of his eyes was pulsating like a weeping growth, and his fingers had transformed into hooked daggers more suited to a reanimated crypt-horror skulking the dark for fresh flesh to prey upon. "-_b-b-b-b-b-bo-boo-_"

"Fallen, I don't know what kind of nightmare or hell this is, but if we're both dead, I-I really need you to fucking kill me again so I go to hell-hell alright? 'C-Cause they ain't my jam, man- this ain't my fuckin' jam-!" Spyra trembled, yipping when one of her newly formed tits started to flop out from under her arm. She released them and then tried to force them back with her palms, squishing the two golden globes together and creating a deep canyon of cleavage that almost looked bottomless. "-D-Don't just stand there god damn it, help me!"

"-_S-Spy-Spyra- b-b-b-b-_" The Fallen stammered like a toddler, staggering forwards another gruelingly-slow step, making Spyra yelp in fright when his heel thundered into the floor. "-_b-b-b-**boobies.**_** _Derg-boobies._**"

"Lordie," Conscience rolled his eyes, sighing as he stalked towards the door of the room. "I'll let you both have the floor for this one. See you in the funnies."

"Fallen, what did you do?" Spyra peeped, her pink eyes darting all over her chest and paws. "I-I don't understand. I-I-"

"**_Boobies._**" The Fallen growled, suddenly appearing more feral. He bore his teeth, and his back hunched in preparation for a lunge, his eyelids twitching as he wriggled his fingers at her. "**_Must. Feed._**"

"Fallen, w-wait-" Spyra sniffled, her paws flying up to her face to clench her cheeks. Tears started running down her snout. "-_I-I'm s-scared._" –She sobbed.

All at once, the dark gloom drained from the Fallen like blood weeping from a wound. He gasped, as if his lungs had been devoid of air, and all of the drool stopped flowing. The human staggered back, hand clapping onto his head as he tried to focus his equilibrium on his own heels.

"-u-uhm…" He croaked, blinking rapidly. The Fallen held out a plated hand and examined his own gauntlet, flexing the fingers. He used the wrist to wipe the spit off his mouth. "-I-uh… I… Spyra…?"

"-_I-I'm so s-scared r-right now-_" The dragoness wept quietly, clawing at her face and curling into a big, seven-foot-tall ball of purple and gold.

The Fallen let a deep sigh deflate from his chest. He clenched his fists, and forced away the inner animal.

_Breathe._

"It's okay, Spyra, I'm here. I'm here to help you." He placed his hands delicately on her upper arms, stroking the scales there as he looked up past the dragon's massive bosom, trying to ignore how it jostled with every other sob. "Shush, it's okay, you're not in any danger, and nothing permanent has happened. Let me explain everything, alright? Calm down, please."

"-_w-what did you do to me-?_" She heaved, the floor creaking as she lowered her massive legs, and sat to be at eye-level with him again. She was so tall now that she had to crouch to reach him. Her tail wrapped over her hips as he followed her down, rubbing her scaly shoulders.

"I-It wasn't _me_ per-say." The Fallen swallowed, wiping away some of her tears with his thumb. "You touched my suit's command console, and, well… I guess it registered what you were to a certain device inside, and, uh…"

"-S-So this is it, huh? T-The big _*snnrrff* -_reveal." She choked, wristing her eye clear. "You go from w-world to world, transforming chicks you dig, blowing up people who try ta' kill ya'."

"…I'm not just about black-and-white things like that, it's more complicat-" He stopped himself, and thought about it for a moment. "…Eehhhh, actually, no that's pretty much it right there. But I have good reasons. And most of them follow traditional ideals of widely accepted morality. Most of them. And besides, I thought you knew that already."

"Y-Yeah, well, _*snrrff* -_I hadn't seen the transforming part yet." Spyra hiccupped, finally finding it within herself to take her paws/hands away from her face. She sulked, leaning back until her new upright rump compressed to the floor. She took a moment to look about herself, feeling up her limbs, her stomach, her chest too. "-I thought only mammals had these." She muttered, grunting when she accidentally brushed a talon over one of the nips. "-_Ow,_ and they're sensitive as fuck. _Why_ are they sensitive as fuck? This all just… I can't…"

"Oh they're sensitive alright." He shuddered, eyeing up the golden orbs.

Spyra hissed and flicked him on the nose.

"Right, sorry." He grunted. "I know this is a lot to take in all at once."

"No shit, getting shape-shifted by some magic-unicorn-shitbeam ain't exactly a common thing around here!" She sniffled. "And where are my wings?"

"They're, uh…" The Fallen leaned closer, frowning when Spyra's eyes darted from him, to her chest, and she clicked her tongue in offense.

"Normally I wouldn't mind, but damn man, give a chick a second to adjust will ya'?"

"That's not what I'm doing. Hold on." He slipped his arms under hers, noting how the dragoness gasped under her breath, and her pupils shrunk from the entirely new feeling of being embraced in a different form.

She'd say nothing to confirm anything right now, but she did admit, it felt rather… _good. _This was a different kind of embrace than what she was used to with him.

The Fallen brushed his fingers over a patch of flesh just behind her scapulas, grazing the tips back and forth for a moment, his face scrunching up in concentration as he felt around.

"I asked for my wings, not a back-rub." Spyra muttered, leaning close to put her snout in his hair. She sniffed the soap-smell and closed her eyes, trying to focus on getting the sniffles to stop. "I did always complain about my height with you, huh?"

"Spyra, it isn't permanent unless you want it to be." The Fallen smirked when he found what he was looking for. Spyra grunted from a brief duo of painful stings, and then, with the sound of unfurling parchment, two slits appeared in the flat patchwork of her back-scales, and from each erected a long, yellow-orange stalk that grew and grew, unfolding joint-to-joint, like paper. "They fold inside, see? You learn to control it after some practice."

"I-It's not supposed to hurt." Spyra shook her head, whining when the last joint popped free, and the orange membranes of her wingspans draped outwards, revealing in full her immensely larger wings. "And they're bigger. _Everything_ is bigger."

"Like I said, you get used to it, it stops hurting after a short time." The Fallen slipped away and sat on the floor in front of her, trying his best to stay focused on her face and not the new feminine assets she'd acquired. "Weapons aren't the only thing I have in this suit."

"Pfft, yeah, no shit." Spyra scoffed, huffing to rid herself of the last traces of her crying. She kept feeling around herself, exploring. "…Well, _that_ wasn't there before, or that, or uh… or _this._ My ass feels like I'm sittin' on water-cushions."

"I know, isn't it hot-" The Fallen shut his lips when her glaring found a new spot to bore through. "-uhm, b-but only if you want it to be hot."

"How can this _not_ be permanent? I'm… I'm _different, _I'm…" Spyra sighed. "-What do we do?"

"I'll change you back." The Fallen held up his gauntlet. "It's the Ray Beam inside the vent-port-"

"In a language I can understand?" She frowned.

"-The device that changed you goes both ways. Some people I meet across the Multiverse want to be, uh… more closer to me, to me myself." He patted his cuirass. "The Ray did what it's supposed to do."

"And you're sure you can change it back?"

"Of course, I wouldn't lie to you about that."

"Heh, at least ya' didn't say you'd never lie to me period." She smirked.

"I can't say I'm perfect." He shrugged. "_You_ on the other hand…"

"What about me?" Spyra was busy wiggling a talon in the naval depression that had appeared on her gut. She stuck her tongue out. "_Ugh,_ dragon's aren't supposed to have worry about frikkin' belly-button lint."

"I think you look-"

"Bodacious, boobalicious, tasty, _risque?_" Conscience listed eagerly from over her shoulder at him. The Fallen glared.

"You look amazing." He said. "You always looked amazing, but I can't describe how much _more_ amazing you look like this."

"That synonymous with anything?"

"You always were beautiful, but not you're fucking hot."

"…Hot, huh?" She rolled her eyes, huffing again and weighing her breasts about. "…I didn't ask for you to do this to me."

"Spyra I'm telling you I'll change you back if that's what you want." He tapped a few keys on the console, and the little screen bleeped a confirmative note. He held out the screen for her, showing a holographic depiction of her in a T-pose in wire-mesh. It rotated, and a little sigil pulsed with blue life as the mesh granulated and reshaped into her quadruped silhouette. "You see? I just have to give you another small zap and that's it, you're you again. I'm willing to call today an accident and leave it at that if you are."

"There's a lot of '_if'_s in there." Spyra ran a paw through the hair-frills centering her forehead, letting them flap back forward. "Isn't this what you wanted? You're drooling just from looking at me."

"I'm not drooling." He flicked spit as he spoke, grunting and wiping it away with his wrist. "-Alright I am, so what? You look amazing, more amazing than ever and I… I would like it, _this,_ you as you are. But Spyra, my choice is irrelevant here. It's your body, and you do with it what you wish."

"Hmph." Spyra cleared her throat, patting her thighs. She wiggled her torso a bit, grinning as the Fallen's eyes started to glass over from seeing her tits jiggle. "It's kinda' fun being able to get reactions out of you."

"R-Reactions, uh, right…" The Fallen smacked his lips, he reached up with his gauntlet. "Let me change you back-"

"Wait, hold on just a second."

The Fallen staggered back as Spyra stood herself up. Her height looked impeccable beforehand, but when she was fully from the floor, back erect, wings spread and arms hung, she was utterly imposing.

The changing had given her a stature of at least seven feet. Her arms were lithe, but streamlined with near-invisible chords of muscle that bulged and flexed every time she moved her limbs. Her legs had become long, defined towers, with thighs thick as tree-trunks and taloned feet that looked capable of shredding sheet metal.

All in all, coupled with that wicked-ass rack of hers, the Fallen was almost tempted to break his own gauntlet so that she wouldn't have a means to reverse it.

But no matter how strong his libido was when it came to draconic poon, nothing would ever overpower the voice in the back of his mind.

"You'd never force yourself on anyone." Conscience grunted by his side. "At least there's something good among all those lacking morals of yours."

Spyra looked to him for reassurance for a second, before she craned one of her new, long legs forwards, and took a single step. She wobbled, and the Fallen quickly settled his hands on her hips to keep her steady.

He wasn't expecting the weight, and so the armor's joints whined as the enhancer servos tightened, allowing him to manage the pounds Spyra had gathered from her transformation. She was heavy. Real _big._ It was really hard to concentrate, what with the air getting so bothered in here.

"See? Not so bad once you get used to it." He said lowly, helping her along as she trotted cautiously in a quick circle. The dragon's gelatinous purple rear kept bumping into his flank as her hips rolled. Again, the Fallen tried to control himself, but even now, he felt his muscles tightening up, his saliva glands began to overflow and his skin felt clammy.

_That smell._

The perfumey scent of pheromones was rife. Spyra was pluming the damn things.

_I hate controlling myself._

"Tell me about it." Conscience scoffed. "This is a good view. I don't mean of her ass- though that's more than decent too -: but I do mean of the future! Look at her, she seems to like it, at least a little."

"It's kinda' the same as walking on my hinds." Spyra smiled, trying to look tougher, only to fail as she stumbled on her heels. "Shut up." She giggled.

Spyra placed a claw on top of the Fallen's head to steady herself, her sniggering fit evolving into a more overwhelming episode as she clung to him desperately.

"Y-You should see your face." She laughed. "You look like a starved guy just offered a steak."

"Not far from the truth, said the peanut-gallery." Conscience scratched his chin. He met the Fallen's angry gaze with a shrug. "What? C'mon, you know I'm telling the truth. If this wasn't an intelligent being we were dealing with, I'd say take it, because you need it."

"I can't help it, I'm sorry." The Fallen cupped the side of her snout, giving attention to her scales with his thumb.

"This is less the mating-crazed dude I'm used to... Don't I look like how _human_ females are supposed to look?" Spyra held his hand, her purple eyes going a bit glassy. She hiccupped a flame and blushed when the soot fled for the ceiling. "Don't I look _better?_"

"Yes." He said carefully. "-Yes all of those things that you said are correct."

"So why do you want me to change back?"

The Fallen gave a quiet laugh, both hands on her snout now.

Spyra gripped his wrists, initially leaning down for what she thought was a kiss he wanted to steal from her. But then, she felt a sting on her arm, and her world flashed white.

**_Bsshhckkk-~! _**

-She became drowned in a glowing mass of broiling energy, and it slowly began to simmer and shrink closer and closer down to the floor.

The Fallen followed the shifting material with his hands, only stopping once he was kneeling, and the light fluttered away, revealing the same quadruped dragoness he had grown so fond of.

"….Aww…" Conscience pouted. "Disappointing."

"…_Oh._" Spyra eventually forced her eyes off of his, and she held up a paw to wriggle the talons, her expression melded between glumness, relief, and perhaps something else. "That was sure as hell an experience."

"Don't think about it too much. We're not there yet, like I said." The Fallen took a shivering sigh, shooting her a reassuring smirk as he clicked a few holographic runes that appeared floating over his wrist-console's screen. "I'm sorry that happened, and I'm sorry if I frightened you."

"Pfft, _frightened_'s one way of puttin' it, brutha'." Spyra chuffed. "You've been apologizing a lot lately, ya' know that?"

The Fallen blinked, but Spyra made it very clear she was no longer comfortable talking about what had gone on. A studious few sniffs around her shoulders and a flex of her wings told him she was back to normal again, but the thoughtful depth now nested in her face was enough to destroy any complacency he might've garnered.

"There's been a lot to apologize for." He told her blankly, standing up, and moving towards the last piece of his armor he needed for the full rig.

His helmet. It was dark, and still snarling with the trifecta visor constantly leering out from between the curved, synthetic metal. He spiraled it in his grip and silently slid it over his head, adjusting the couplings with a few hisses and clicks.

Spyra sighed and played with her claws. The Fallen's suit gave off a confirmative hum, and the helm's visor erupted into a fervent glowing of neon green. It was this that looked down at her now, not the eyes she was used to from him.

"We should find the Guardians and plan our next move." His voice crackled out through the speakers. "We can talk more about this later."

"How cliché." She stuck her forked tongue out and followed after him. "And F.Y.I: that was _my _fault, yeah? I'm the one who was grabbin' shit I shouldn't have been."

"I wasn't even thinking about it."

"But now that I know what it is," Spyra watched the roll of his thin hips as she fell behind him. "-it's making me wonder."

"Yes?"

"Are you gonna' do what you did to me, to Cynder?"

He didn't answer her.

* * *

{🐉}

"You're handling this rather well."

"_What?_" Cyrila's head popped out from the washroom archway, water still dripping off her cyan coat and pattering into the rug. "Says who? I can always appreciate a moment of victory, even if it came at the cost of my beautiful talons being soiled with all that snow-slush and the mud."

"Forgetting the dragons who are still lying dead at Solemn?" Ignitia clicked her tongue, glaring at her friend as she lounged on the room's futon. Cyrila only grunted before ducking back, the sounds of a brush scrubbing harshly against scales whispering out from the chamber.

Ignitia sighed and gazed out the guestroom window. Oversight occupied the bottom flesh of the panes, as sad and broken looking as it had been the day prior and all throughout the night. There were still some fires birthing spires of oily black smoke high into the otherwise lovely sky. The rain had stopped, and the overcast had been slain, leaving in its place a relatively open blue that edged golden orange the closer to the horizon one followed it.

That was in the direction of Avalar. The hints of its unnaturally beautiful airspace could be glanced at in peaks all across the southern coast and even in the Eastern Kingdoms. Nobody alive knew what the phenomenon of the valley's heavens was, or what was its cause.

The Cheetah rangers that hunted and lived in the enchanted forests that studded the landscape there had a name for it: '_I'aacha vlinn gor ma' –_in their tongue. It literally meant '_The endless gaze of love'._

Ignitia's mood was already in the shitter, and that reminder of lore did nothing to improve it. Maybe it was because she was spiteful over her exchange of words with Terradora, or because she was being prevented from doing the things she enjoyed in life due to all the fighting.

But really, she liked to think the true cause was her relative recent realization that she was clinically lonely.

And she wasn't the only one.

"I cannot fathom the workload that's piled up back in Warfang. I've practically been absent for the last semester, and I'm poorer of it. I have no doubt that the Council is still aloof and drowned in bickering chaos. Knowing that all of this gets unloaded on _your_ wings, Ignitia, makes it much more agitating." Cyrila said. "…Actually, I meant to ask you: has that aberrant cretin we hired as a secretary, Bilou I think? Has he done anything about that warlock's curse? Or has he just coated all of our offices in disgusting mucus? I won't set a paw in that campus if he's still-"

"I'm worried about Volteera."

Again, Cyrila popped her head around the doorframe to look at Ignitia as she sulked on the cushions. The Ice Guardian sniffed and slipped back to continue scrubbing.

So much dirt, bacteria and other unsightly filth! It was all over her. Over every single _inch._ It needed to be dealt with immediately and completely.

Though, she doubted her so-reasonable explanations for such atrocities would sate the angry Mole cleaners when they found the washroom not only flooded but covered in sud-drippings. Cyrila wing-shrugged at it.

It technically wasn't _her_ room, after all. Besides, the cleaners should've been thanking her for providing the work that secured their jobs.

"I don't see how we can't be worried about her, she was whisked away by a pathological narcissist and psychopath." Cyrila huffed coldly. "But feign personal differences: Volteera's as tough as any of us. This isn't the first time she was lost behind the enemy lines."

"So you really are concerned too?" Ignitia watched the washroom's archway intensively, her wings splaying. "Cyrila?"

"_Yesyes,_ did I not just express this?" Cyrila scoffed. "Honestly Ignitia, months of absence have befallen us and the world's ending _again,_ and this is how you greet me? With this mood of yours?"

"I tried to be warm hearted." Ignitia daggered her brows. "You were just being _you_ as always with that cold shoulder."

"_Oh,_ I almost forgot about your affectionate _Elemental humor. _I hate it when you tell ice-jokes." Cyrila scowled, tisking when she dropped her scrubbing brush. "It makes me feel belittled."

"_You!_" Ignitia cackled, startling Cyrila and making her drop the brush a second time where it rattled on the floor. "Are you being serious right now, or is the head injury? I don't think you can use the second one as an excuse, the Fallen's medical device saw to that."

"What it is is irrelevant! But that _creature! _That armored monstrosity with the irrevocably hideous attitude and that ugly snorting-laugh he does." The Ice Guardian guffawed, angrily snatching back her brush. "I've never seen anything like it. Terradora's descriptions of its pestilence must be apt."

_Always the victim._

Ignitia growled and chewed on her thumb-talon.

"You said that it fell from the sky?"

"According to Spyra." Ignitia muttered.

"_Yes,_ Spyra. That Purple Dragoness. She shames the Ancestors with her behavior. And her _temper._ Gods!"

"_Oh for the love of god, just shut up._" The Guardian of Fire cupped her face in her claws and huffed.

"Did you say something, Ignitia? I didn't hear you, I had suds in the listening-holes."

"It isn't important." When Cyrila peaked around the frame, Ignitia shot her the sharpest shit-eating-grin she could muster. "It's nothing, sister."

"_Hmmph~._" Cyrila upturned her snout and vanished back in the room. Water sploshed, and some of the small lake she was creating with all the puddles ran across the tiles and started to dampen the carpet past the divider bar. "It's a lot to be afraid of when one loses even a small block of time to circumstance and inconvenience. I don't think anyone likes coming home to things being disordered and shifted from when they left. But now I sound like Terra', and the last thing my life needs is the influence of a mutton-head like her."

"I just wanted her to come home." Ignitia said, her tone grim and heavy. "I just wanted us to be together for when this challenge came to our doorstep. Now it's here, and I'm too late."

"Ignitia-" Cyrila lost the words with an annoyed huff. She trotted out of the washroom and sat on the carpet, dabbing herself dry with a large towel she'd nabbed off the rack inside. "We've always talked about work and life like they're the same thing. I think what would be most instructive and healthy would be if we made just enough of a slice between the two. Because there _is_ a line, I just feel like we've blinded ourselves to which side we stand upon."

"Maybe it's like that for most dragons." Ignitia shook her head, scratching at her crown with a hind paw. "We're _Guardians_. We literally live by the book. Actually, we _are_ the book. I guess I foolishly assumed when we were younger that that meant we wrote the rules, and then it turned out that they write _us_."

"You're being lethargic." Cyrila rebuked. "What really has you so bothered? It can't be what happened to me."

"Could it possibly be that my best friend and someone who I consider a sister is trapped in the claws of- of- what did you call her? A psychopath? How apt." Ignitia gave her an angry look, but forced it to soften. "And of course what happened to you bothers me too. But right now we don't even know where in the woods of Avalar Volteera is specifically. Cynder could've hidden her almost anywhere. Twilight Falls, Evergreen Rise, the Elkyards? Anywhere! And it's driving me crazy!"

"I can see that."

"I don't know what I'll do with myself if-" Ignitia swallowed. "…if something happened to Volteera."

Cyrila rolled her tongue around in her mouth and took a second to examine over her talons for any scuffs she might've missed. She knew better than to promise anything.

"I wish I believed you when you said you cared."

The Ice Guardian gasped, a claw to her chest from the blow she had been dealt.

"I do care!" She squawked. "How could I not care about what's happening right now? Volteera is single-clawedly the most annoying scatterbrained dragon I have ever met in my life! But… she's still…"

Cyrila had a look that someone would wear after swallowing engine coolant. When she failed to finish the sentence, Ignitia let out a groan of torture and buried her face in the cushions before her chest.

"That came out wrong." Cyrila licked her chops.

"Yes, it did." Ignitia muffled. "Gods, I just want to know that she's okay."

"If Cynder could tolerate me for as long as she did, than Volteera's alive and well." Cyrila admitted in a rare moment of humility. When Ignitia took her head out of the futon and stared, bug-eyed, at her, she wing-shrugged. "Leave it! I speak merely facts, plain and true!"

"I like it better when you talk that way, Cyrie'." Ignitia sighed with a tired grin.

"Ugh, you know I hate that pet-name. It's so demeaning for someone of my stature."

"Go over this with me one more time, while we're on the subject of work." The Fire Dragon requested. "Before your kidnapping, a consul with the queen herself?"

"Lilith's a confused one." Cyrila murmured. "A dragoness put on the spot too early and with too much haste. She wasn't ready to be queen, even with her record. I agree with Terradora's views on her personality- which I've discovered as abhorrently worth only pity, some days –but her views on Lilith's politics couldn't be further from the truth. For a dragon whose personal life is invaded by them, politics bend to her will, and so too does the city guard."

"Maybe they _used_ to." Ignitia shut her eyes.

"None survived?"

"Perhaps a clawful."

"I know the eldest of Crownhorn's houseguard yet lives." Cyrila fluffed her wings. "The keykeeper to all the gates and doors in the castle. I believe Terra' met him already. He's an amputee, missing a wing and utterly flightless."

"Did Terra' mention him?" Ignitia asked, shooing away a trio of little hummingbirds that had slipped into the chamber from a small vine-crusted crevice in the ceiling. The birds squeaked in offense and quickly zipped back through the gap like colorful dust being sucked down a funnel.

"No, but judging by the rather… unpleasant adjectives I heard him mumbling in her presence, I'd say the two are somewhat familiar." The Ice Guardian neatly folded her towel and set it down on the dresser top. Ignitia took a moment to glance incredulously between it and the messy bathroom floor. "What?"

"You're so eccentric." Ignitia nuzzled at her. "Anyway, I think I know who you're talking about."

"His name's Razoruk." Cyrila harrumphed. "And we need him to give us his key."

"Didn't Terradora already unlock the throneroom doors?" Ignitia quizzed as she slid off the futon.

"We don't need the throneroom key." Her cold friend shook her head. "Lilith found something before the battle was in commitment, something she only told me and Volteera of before she locked herself inside those chambers."

"This sounds serious." Breathed Ignitia. "But if whatever it is, has to do with the throneroom, there's only two-"

"It isn't the Vision Pool." Cyrila relieved her. "But it could be in danger soon if nothing is done. There's something underneath the city, something Malefora hatched a scheme to place there before Urukal's army assaulted the gates. Lilith was stringent on details, but I know this: it terrified her enough that she risked abandoning her own castle and all its patrons. That in and of itself is enough to turn my crown."

"Mine too." Ignitia stared thoughtfully. "It's in the Ro-"

**_BAM~! _**–the guest room door flew wide open and slammed into the wall, making Ignitia yip and Cyrila shriek.

"_Volteera-?!_"

Cyrila clapped a paw over her snout, freezing (with no pun intended) when she saw Ignitia gawking at her.

"Hey, lookie' who I found all bushy-tailed and shit." Spyra smirked, her tail wagging as she trotted into the room like she owned the joint. That sass. Cyrila was immediately offended. "'Sup Queen Freeze?"

"I hope to god you're not speaking to _me._" Cyrila narrowed her eyes.

"Why? You got a problem, Purple-Winged and Pointy?" Spyra gave a challenging purse of her chops. "Listen Chikita, I didn't get a whole lot outta' everything you were blabbin' about back in the mountains, but from the bits I gathered I think I got enough of a picture. Lemme' just put it out there before someone gets hurt: the self-induced god complex? Uh uh, _nope,_ Spyra no likey, we ain't getting along with that in the way."

"Then that's going to be a problem." Ignitia sighed.

"Are you simply observing this?!" Cyrila shouted, gesturing at Spyra as she gave Ignitia an incredulous face of typical Ice Dragon-brand disbelief. "Your own student is talking to us like we're two of her stupid, smelly little friends!"

"Oi', I don't have a whole lot of friends, but I can tell ya': they _ain't_ smelly." Spyra frowned, sizing Cyrila up from toe to chin. "And you know, now that I'm getting a good look at you, I'm pretty freaked out. You look like a dragon had sex with an icicle."

**_Thmp~!_**

-Cyrila's upcoming outburst died in a whistling breath when the floor thundered right beside her, making the poor Ice Guardian yelp and leap away on her heels like a startled cat.

Ignitia had rolled onto the ground and was hysterically laughing.

"-_I-I- AHA-~! I-I needed that-~!" _She heaved.

"_Ignitia!_" Cyrila fumed with grit fangs. "Stop that immediately!"

"Yeah, I knew it." Spyra plopped her rump on the carpet and polished her knuckles on her chest scutes. "I should be in comedy."

"Evidently," Said a male voice behind her, bootfalls clomping onto the floor as a fourth party quietly ducked into the room. "I don't think I've ever seen Ignitia laugh that hard."

"…_Ohhhh, ha… y-you might be right._" Ignitia heavenly sighed, rolling onto her flank. She shocked even Spyra when the Fire Guardian purposefully angled her plump hip and laid her chin in her paw, her wings preening as she gazed at the human standing in the doorway. "_Hello,_ Fallen~."

"At least be subtle, god damn it." Spyra glared.

"Fantastic, the sky-creature's attitude appears no better." Cyrila tisked. The Guardian put her foot down, shooting Spyra's musing expression off her face as she looked down angrily on the smaller hen. "And as for _you,_ Purple Dragon, there is much you need to learn not only in ways of respect, but of _maturity._"

"_Pfffft,_ bae', I think I got the maturity part covered." Spyra giggled, her tail lashing around the Fallen's armored ankle to yank him closer. "Ain't that right, babe'?"

"If you say so." The Fallen took off his helmet, and offered Cyrila a smile. "Hello again, Guardian of Ice."

"…Hmmph." Cyrila turned her snout up on Spyra, turning fully to address the human properly for the very first time since the mountains. She was almost two heads taller than him, but he was still level enough that she didn't have to look down, at least, which she admired. "Maybe I misjudged a small sliver of your temperament, sky-alien."

"Fallen's fine, please." He coughed. "And might I say: what lovely, bubbly and blue hindquarters you have. I'd love to use my power tool to repaint them a paler shade one of these evenings."

**_Thmp~! _**

As Spyra rolled around on the floor, her cackles _almost_ covered up the sound of Ignitia making that same, tortured, aroused moan from the mountain pass. Cyrila's jaw dropped when she saw the Fire Guardian squeezing her thighs together and sinking her teeth into the carpet, her amber eyes locked- half-lidded –with lust onto the human's cuirassed chest.

"Don't take this the wrong way, because I know we just met, but based on what I've seen of you," The Fallen leaned closer, making Cyrila flinch back in shocked horror. "-you might have some stuff you have to get used to with this group."

"H-How dare you-" Cyrila couldn't even form a full sentence.

"-_Oh, ohmygawd- t-that was fuckin' hysterical-!_" Spyra groaned, her laughing fits slowly starting to ebb away for tired heaves. "-I-I'm telling ya', you, me, human-boi'? Comedy acts, every Thursday evening, we'd be rich…"

"Ignitia? Ignitia?" A deep, feminine voice bellowed out from the hallway. A second later, Terradora's massive frame appeared in the arch. She tucked her wings and started to squeeze through, giving the Fallen a snarl. "Move, parasite, I'm coming inside."

"_That's what she said_." Conscience giggled.

"Uh-huh." The Fallen lazily lumbered back a step, and Terradora growled as she reeled the full length of her tail inside with her.

"Ignitia, you and I must speak, the words we left one another with were not professional, and I must apo-" Terradora froze mid-sentence when she saw Cyrila's horrified look. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"N-Not you-" Cyrila blubbered.

"And why are you rolling around like a cat?" Terradora blinked at Spyra, getting angrier with each new '_thing'_ she found before her. "And why do _you_ look so smug?"

"It's com-" The Fallen started to say.

"And- Ancestors, _Ignitia?!_" Terradora cried. "_W-Why- Why are you **humping the carpet?!**_"

**_Thmp~! _**–and Spyra was on the floor again. Nobody moved, even as poor Ignitia gyrated her plump, amber hips into the flooring, steam forming factory-quality pillars out of her snout as she gazed drunkenly up at Terradora, lost in a miasma of developing sweat and unbearable heat penetrating her body.

"…._Mmmmmheelppmeeee~…_" She moaned, muffled by the fibers of the décor of foot-level choice.

"I was going to say," Terradora blinked when the Fallen held his finger up. "-it's complicated."

* * *

{🐉}

"This is where the old geezer was hanging out before we took off." Spyra said, poking around the abandoned and dark armory. Nothing but vacant forges, tired anvils and empty racks were there to greet her, the Guardians and the Fallen. "Maybe he had a stroke and fell off the palisades."

"_Spyra._" Ignitia blushed, coming back from the forge station she'd been checking around. "To Cyrila's earlier point, could you please try to be a bit more respectful to your elders? I'm not demanding anything, it is merely a kind request."

"…*_sigh* -_Alright alright, jeez'…" Spyra groaned like a teenage girl told to do chores. The Fallen kept his smirk to himself, but did make a note of it.

"We should keep looking." Cyrila said from the stairwell leading back upstairs to the castle. She had refused to step foot in the old armory the second she saw even a hint of all the soot-dust down here. "Have any of you tried over there? Or there? How can a full-grown drake simply disappear into thin air?"

"You're a trip, lady." Spyra snapped.

"He isn't here." Ignitia's wings drooped. "This would go faster, checking every chamber, if Terra' were helping us too."

"Hardly an option with the way she stormed out." Cyrila sat on the bottom step and started grooming one of her paws with an astute expression. Everything with her was matter-of-factly. The Fallen couldn't help that the first word he kept thinking of with the Guardian was _snob._ "I was almost out the door with her."

"I told you that things had become much more stressful since we saw each other last." Ignitia shook her head.

"And that has earned you a floor fetish?"

"_Ha! _Sister, lemme' tell you something: what you _think_ you saw back there? It ain't got nothing to do with floors." Spyra cackled, her musings sharply bouncing around the forge chambers. She kicked a small smelting pot over as she trudged around, idly nudging it to roll away with a hollow ring of iron. When it hit the base of one of the bricked walls, the normally minute _thumm _–was exasperated by the eerie silence, and so a crash of thunder was born instead throughout the shadowy depths of the castle's bowels. "Damn, this place is huge. It must look like the Warfang markets down here when people are actually doin' their jobs."

"That's quite an accurate summation of how the forges were right before the battle." Cyrila nodded, looking about the recesses between the various forge stations.

The floor was infested with articulately curved and dead-looking creepers that crunched under their heels when stepped upon. Draconic heads carved into the stonework via brass etching each held opened mouths with baskets formed to resemble bronze tongues slipping from their mouths. Only some of them were filled with sconces, and even fewer of those were lit.

"I believe the term is '_Spooky'._" Ignitia giggled, sidling up to the Fallen as he finished examining another banded smelt pot the size of his torso on the ground. "I warn you, that where we ultimately are going, it only gets darker."

"I've dealt with places far worse than this." The Fallen grimly murmured. "Crownhorn's understructure speaks to a lot of those places for me. But this place is just lonely, it isn't haunted."

"Both are due pity." Ignitia nodded, looking about his armor with appraising eyes. "You're taller in this outfit of yours."

"And stronger." He grinned, picking up the solid-iron pot with one hand to lift it up by the rim. The metal groaned under his grip, and tiny whines of servos whispered out from the suit. Ignitia smiled at him. "We'll put it all to good use I'm thinking. So, where else can we look for this guy?"

"He shouldn't be this elusive to begin with. What a waste of time!" Cyrila started complaining, and Ignitia immediately stepped forward to try and calm her down.

Watching the rambling exchange for a moment, Spyra groaned quietly, and looked around the forge for something to preoccupy herself with.

She hummed and moved into one of the forge stations, galloping over to an opened furnace-throat that exposed an old coal bed. It still stunk of the brimstone-like scent weaponsmithing gave off here, and it repulsed her.

"_Blegh._" She shot a candle's flame out her nose. "Place stinks, it's dark as hell and boring. _So so boring._"

Normally, back in the swamps, rampant episodes of Spyra-brand boredom had been remedied by nature-treks through the marshes, picking fights with giant insects, and setting things on fire.

The last thought spoke to her inner pyro, and so with a wicked smile, Spyra hopped back, stood on her hinds and oriented her face for the furnace-throat.

"This might go a bit quicker if we calm down." The Fallen patiently quipped to the Guardians.

"How dare you attempt to make demads of me." Cyrila harrumphed. "Ignitia, make the sky-alien appropriate the necessary apologies I so deserve. I will not stand for this disrespect."

"_Heh-heh._" The Fallen put his gauntlets on his hips and tried to ward away a comeback by smiling up at the ceiling. "_If only you didn't have the curviness I so seek to penally-smite, I could talk up an insult to make you cry for your mother._"

"Do all of your kind try to communicate with others through such _mumbling?_" Cyrila scoffed.

"Hey guys! I think we need some _fi-yah~!_"

Spyra cupped her chops, and the roaring whoosh of birthed flame announced her actions simultaneously as the blindingly bright cone of fire that whipped out of her mouth.

The flames shot directly into the furnace-throat and ignited the fuel-mix lying about inside. The whole machine lit amber and a cluster of exhaust-pipes spidering up into the ceiling squeaked as little reams of steam escaped their notches and rattled their tubes.

The forge illuminated the whole station a bloody orange, and as Spyra cackled at the entertaining display, she pranced back on her own heels-

-And she hit something behind her.

Jumping, the purple dragon scurried around and away and looked at the previously dark recess of the station. An old, chiseled and angry-looking snout of a dragon frowned back at her.

"_Holy shit-!_" She shrieked, sprinting out of the station in a hurry. "-You're full of it, Fallen, this place is haunted as fuck!"

"That isn't a ghost." Ignitia breathed in relief. The forge screamed only for a brief moment longer before the steam calmed, and the light slightly dimmed. "If you could please reveal yourself, friend?"

"…I'm not your friend_._" –Rasped a crackly, aged voice. Claws clicked on the forge floor as a dragon slowly slid from the darkness, his body clinging to the shadows, as if they could not detach from one another. Razoruk's atrophied form quivered, and his yellow fangs remained dull despite the glare of the forge-fire. "I am not any of your friend_._ Leave."

"We haven't even told you what we want." The Fallen called over, stepping to put himself beside Ignitia.

"I know what you want. You want my keys." Razoruk croaked, his sole wing twitching as he tried and failed to splay it on its ruined joints. He snarled and whipped his tail into the forge station's security wall with a dull thud. "Damn my body."

"Old one, do not interfere with matters of the state." Cyrila stated, still not leaving her spot on the stairs. "We are the Guardians of Warfang, and our authority is absolute in times of war. Help us help you, if you would."

"Razoruk, my name is Ignitia-"

"I know who you are." Razoruk growled. "I know who all of you are. I said the same to the Guardian of Earth, before she accosted me, and assaulted me."

_Oh Terra'…_ Ignitia sighed tiredly. _Can't you ever try to talk to someone before you just punch them in the mouth?_

"Well, Razoruk, you don't have to fear such behavior from me or my fellows." Ignitia smiled warmly. "We only seek to help the city, and now that the siege is lifted, we must attend to any other issues that might be present here."

"That _are_ present." Cyrila corrected, almost stepping off the last level of the flight and quickly stopping herself. "We need your key to the Roseways."

The Fallen and Spyra had only been able to get general information about the Roseways, but aside from the mystery of whatever was going on down there, that might've been _all_ they needed.

The Roseways were a combination of artificial catacombs, underground roads and naturally forming cavities created by the massive rootballs of all the plants growing throughout Crownhorn Castle.

"No." Razoruk snapped, his breath wheezing as his cloudy eyes grew fierce. "You'll do more harm than good if you try to interfere with Queen Lilith's duties. She's the only one who can talk to the plants, and rid the land of corruption."

"What is he talking about?" The Fallen asked.

"The Dark Master, sky warrior." Razoruk glared. "For she poisons everything she touches. The only one who can undo that magic is Lilith."

"What magic? I don't appreciate the vagueness." The Fallen frowned. "If Malefora's put something inside the Roseways, than we can't just rely on your judgment-call and assumptions. Not to be rude, but the only thing I know about this _Lilith_ character, is that she likes locking herself in rooms while war eats the city she's supposed to be chaperoning. You'll have to excuse my lack of trust."

"Lilith _saved_ Oversight! And we gave all of our lives to do it!-" Razoruk shouted, his voice cracking into a dusty cough. When he recovered, he wiped his chops on a paw and snarled at them. "-I am the last of the Crownhorn Guard. They all died stopping the Dark Army from getting in the first time, and Lilith was at that spearhead. If it weren't for her delaying the advance, the Dark Army would've overrun the streets days before you all even knew of the true danger."

"…Mm, Boulderzilla didn't mention none of that." Spyra muttered, sheepishly emerging from where she had been hiding behind Ignitia. The purple dragoness coughed. "By the way, uh… I-I wasn't really scared. I just wanted you all to think… I wanted the old guy to think… or the ghosts… _fuck me._" She gripped her own face.

"I thought we were trying to be charismatic." Ignitia whispered to the Fallen. "I realize that he's a bit of a difficult drake to get along with, but we can't let his pigheadedness influence our strategy here."

"_You_ were trying to be charismatic. Up until that little serenade he just gave, I honestly thought he was senile." He pointed out, holding up his hand when she flared a look at him. "Just let me try, okay?"

"Probably for the best anyhow. Ya'll don't trust me with first impressions anyway." Spyra lazily kicked her hind leg.

"We have met before." Razoruk sneered. "I can hear everything you all are saying. I'm not _that_ old."

"Boo-hoo, gramps, it's not like I just wasted my day trying to set up a fund for some new fuckin' hearing-aids for ya' or nothing."

"_Spyra!_" Ignitia gasped.

"We need him to give us a key! What are you all doing?" Cyrila gawked.

"_More then you~!_" Spyra barked back. "What, the dust is gonna' blemish one of your nails?"

"_Be quiet."_

The Fallen used the volume of his helm's speakers, so the interjection trumped all but the roar of the forge Spyra had ignited. All of the dragons looked to him, and the bickering silenced.

"Thank you." He sighed. "Razoruk, whatever Lilith has or hasn't done isn't important right now, and whatever Terradora did to you is irrelevant. Oversight still needs help, because it can't overcome Malefora on its own."

"…Was that supposed to convince me?" Razoruk frowned.

"No, but it _was_ to distract you." Spyra happily muffled, prancing away from the elder with a small brass ring clenched in her teeth, the cluster of keys latched to it jingling with each step. "Thanks for the charity, shit-breath."

"_My keys!_" Razoruk howled.

"Unorthodox, but effective I suppose." Ignitia took the ring from Spyra's mouth. Evidently, since Terra' had stolen the throneroom key, old Raz' wasn't letting the rest out of his sight.

At least until now, that was.

"If you interrupt the Queen's efforts, you'll kill her! And doom the land!" Razoruk pleaded, his joints cracking as he started barreling for Ignitia. "_I won't let you endanger her-_"

"Stop." The Fallen stepped in his path, but that wasn't what made the elder screech to a halt.

Razoruk had no idea what the Doomblaster was, or how it worked specifically. But he _did_ know the basic silhouette of a Mole flintlock pistol, which the weapon somewhat resembled.

The Fallen half-pointed it at his chest, motionless otherwise as he pinned the dragon with both the gun and the glowing green stare of his visored helm.

"We don't have time for him." He clarified when Ignitia raised a paw to try and calm him down. He already _was_ calm: it was the _impatience_ driving this. "Razoruk, step away from us and stay where you are."

"A mercy then." Razoruk's jaw quivered as he sulked away from the human.

"I just don't want to shoot you."

"If this were ten years ago, we would see about that."

"Unfortunately for you: it isn't. I'm not asking again." He looked over his pauldron at Cyrila. "Take us to where we have to go."

"-Wait-"

"_I said back off._" The Fallen directly aimed the barrel of his weapon for right between Razoruk's eyes.

"-I'm going with you!" The old dragon cried, defiantly staring past the gun and at the human's visor. "You'll have to kill me if you think I'll let you near the Queen unsupervised as easily as you stole my keys."

"I don't seem ta' remember this bein' a negotiation, you geriatric freak." Spyra growled. "Just let us do our jobs, yeah? It'll all be fine by tomorrow evening, and you can rest your whittle' wrinkly head on the nest-pillow safe and sound."

"Spyra, let's not be completely authoritarian here." Ignitia suggested with an encouraging- frankly disarming –smile. "The gentledrake was treated rather harshly by Terra', and now we come along and… well, we do _this._ I think we can at least allow him to keep an eye on what we intend to do, even if he doesn't have the choice of stopping us."

"No fuckin' way, he smells like mothballs, I don't want him prancing around next to me!"

"No, she's right." The Fallen lowered his gun. "It's his castle more than ours. I agree with Ignitia, but whatever is down there must be dealt with. I think we can agree to do that together?"

The human looked to Razoruk now, to which the elder dragon snorted, allowing a lick of flame to flash briefly before his muzzle. The lack of objection was good enough for the Fallen, and so he turned on a heel and started stalking towards the stairwell and Cyrila.

"Alright then, let's move." He held his gauntlet out for Spyra. The giggling purple heroine galloped after him after another quick glare at Razoruk.

"They make an odd pair." Cyrila mumbled as Ignitia passed beside her. "You still haven't told me everything that's going on."

"The Fallen's shaken things up quite a bit. He and Spyra are- w-well, I'll tell you when we're done saving the world again." Ignitia swallowed, trying to snap the subject's spine as she waited for Razoruk to shuffle after them solemnly. "I'm pleased to have some accordance, Houseguard, we just want to help."

"I'm used to the West imposing its will on us." Razoruk glumly remarked, sneering when Cyrila quickly side-stepped to avoid touching him. "The End Times find us when the Guardians of Warfang strong-arm the Houseguard of Oversight."

"As I said, we're only doing what must be done." Ignitia sighed.

"Lady Terradora said the same thing." Razoruk doused his chuckle with venom.

* * *

{🐉}

"It's stuck!" Cyrila yipped, jamming her fist into the turn-slot. The lock flickered heavily as she tried to force it with her wrist. "It's really stuck!"

"Let me try." Ignitia volunteered with a chipper smile. Cyrila didn't like it. She didn't like it that she was angry and Ignitia wasn't angry too. That just didn't sit right.

"You stole my keys and cannot even use them?" Razoruk sighed. "They push _in._"

"I know that, how dare you suggest otherwise." Cyrila growled.

**_BSSHHKK~! _**–The great throneroom doors moaned as the blow sent them flipping towards their own guts. Each hit the walls beyond in a pair of stupendous crashes that saw dust frothing in the air all over the place.

The Fallen wiped at an invisible scuff on his pauldron and shuffled through the arch, Spyra trotting just behind him.

"Good thing you did it before me, dude, I bruise like a banana, and I don't have all that fancy plating." She chuckled.

"I'm always one to get the door for a lady." The Fallen sighed, taking a moment to glance around the chamber. "…I take it Lilith has a thing for plants?"

"_A thing._" Razoruk mimicked grumpily under his breath. The elder tucked his sole remaining wing to his back and angrily limped between the two Guardians as he passed inside. He craned an eye at the rows of hanging plants practically turning the ceiling into a forest. "Some of those roses are older than me. Lilith cares for the gardens of generations ago whom planted them."

"_Shhffft,_ ack-! _Shfffttt-!_" Spyra shook her head, sneezing. "It's so friggin' _humid_ in here, what gives?"

"It could be a hunch," The Fallen mumbled, starstruck as the forest of planters invading the pillared hall's flanks overwhelmed his eyes. "but it might be because we just stepped into the Amazon."

"The fuck is an _Ama-zon?_ Sounds like some weird-ass type of shape nobody's cared about."

"We need the moisture to keep the ecosystem healthy." Razoruk growled, taking a moment to step between two of the pillars. He nudged a few massive frond-leaves back into their place within the planter, scattering a trio of little cherry-sized hummingbirds that immediately fled into the nest of flowerpots hanging above them.

With all the birds flittering between them on quietly pattering wings, the pots resembled some kind of naturally erected city literally sprawling over their heads. Some of the hummingbirds paused in their flight paths to glance down at the newest arrivals. One of them zipped over to inspect Spyra, buzzing in front of her face back and forth as it dodged her attempts to swat it.

"-_Ah-! Jeez'_-! Back off, you little shit!" Spyra squawked.

"I think it likes you." The Fallen smirked, holding out a plated finger for another of the birds to poke at with its beak. When he wiggled it, the hummingbird zipped over the knuckle and imposed itself before his visor. He stood still and let it sniff about, before it took off back the way it came. "They're harmless, Spyra, calm down."

"_Get off-!_" She growled. A lick of flame crackled out, and the frightened bird squeaked before fleeing under one of the palm ferns. "Thing was trying to eat my face or somethin'."

"Oh my." Ignitia murmured in wonder, testing the weight of a frond hanging over the aisle with her tail. She bent over to sniff at a Lilly poking out from a grassy breach in the floor, oblivious as the poor Fallen stared with silent hunger at her crimson haunches. "Oh this is all so beautiful!"

"It's a bit hot, if you ask me." Cyrila clicked her tongue. She held up a paw and breathed a cone of glowing frost over her wrist. "I see the throne's empty of our charge."

"What kinda' queen doesn't sit in her own throne?" Spyra trotted down the damp, blue rug running down the aisle, her heels giving off wet plops in the serene haze of the chamber.

There was a sprawling blossom-tree birthed from the floor behind a silver and onyx throne. Dappling rays of sunlight cascaded through the painted skylights overhead, the petals falling from the tree giving tiny daggers of black as they acted to shade their bellies from the luminance.

"If you won't respect me, then respect Queen Lilith. She has many duties." Razoruk chided, sadly presiding before the throne. "…As did her mother before her."

"Oversight's succession must be pretty long." The Fallen edged a brow as he noticed a tiny flashing alert-rune in the motion-detector box of his helm's HUD. The readings for lifeforms were going crazy from all the birds and insects living in the plants, but aside from that, the magicka detectors were spinning something fierce.

Not _all_ the signatures he was picking up went idle when he restricted the size-filters. One of them- the vitals of a dragon –emanated from the far side of the room, through an arch and stairwell descending behind the blossom tree into a lower level.

"I've got her, in case you all were wondering."

"Got her? Got _who?_" Cyrila sniffed.

"My suit's systems can detect the presence of others in a short distance. I'm seeing a dragon's life signs just down that way." The Fallen trailed as he played with the filters. "…And I'm seeing a whole bunch of other weird stuff."

"Like what? Does this mean we get to kick _more_ ass today?" Spyra gleefully hopped, her tail wagging much like a placated dog's.

"Let me understand this. _Fallen,_ you call yourself? You are saying that this… _attire,_" Cyrila distastefully turned her snout up at the suit as she gestured a paw. "-is enchanted with wards of life-sight?"

"Holy crap, I'm surrounded by _nerds._" Spyra huffed under her breath.

"It's not entirely magic, most of it is run by machines called computers." The Fallen nodded, ignoring the commentary. "It's usually meant to alert me of danger, but in cases like this, or when I'm hunting that delicious derg-poon, it can give me a head's up."

"Excuse me?" Cyrila crinkled her nose. "What exactly is… '_derg-poon'-?_" She tried mimicking. Spyra snickered.

"Don't ask, you'll do yourself a world of favors." Ignitia sighed.

"…Wait… that last bit is slang for- _oh, h-how- how dare you!_" Cyrila gasped, a paw to her breast as she reclined from the Fallen with insult. "And in the presence of a fairer hen!"

"Yeah, 'cause y'know, me and Ignitia are just a buncha' dirty boondock dykes in the uneducated corner, right?" Spyra testily guffawed.

"Speak for yourself." Ignitia grinned in a rare moment of spice, winking.

"He likes vag', sista', and I can't blame him." Spyra laughed, encouraged by her mentor. "So you better get used to it. Apparently, my boi' here has a thing for slipping anything but his own species the sausage, particularly dragons."

"…_Dragons…_?" Cyrila was still struggling to connect the dots. She gasped again. "…Y-You mean, he… with…?"

"_Menn-neeee tiyym-za. _Yeah, I've had human for supper a lot the last month." Spyra flexed her brows and licked her teeth, experiencing a momentary shiver that sent her wings quivering. "And he is _ssooooo_ delicious… Mhmmmm~…"

"Careful, or I might eat _you _this time." The Fallen mumbled. He grabbed one of her haunches and squeezed, making the dragoness growl with pleasure.

Cyrila looked like she was about to throw up.

"Your Majesty?" Razoruk called, completely ignoring the nonsense as he limped up the steps and lingered past the throne. "…My Queen?"

"She normally doesn't leave the throne during the day I take it." The Fallen said to Cyrila. When the Ice Guardian just flapped her chops and squeaked at him, he blinked and turned to Ignitia. "She's got to be down in wherever those stairs go to. Razoruk, what's there?"

"The Royal Vision Pool." Razoruk quipped impatiently. "She isn't supposed to be down there…"

A frightened yelp echoing up the flight raised all of their heads.

"_Queen Lilith!_" Razoruk cried, cursing as he tripped over his own limp and almost ate the bottom steps. He bounded down the flight in panic, following the sharp noise.

"Things always gotta' get interesting." Spyra huffed beside the Fallen as they hurried after the elder dragon. "You ready, dude?"

"Very." The Plunger of Doom finished materializing in his grip, and it swung with his arms as he jogged. Cyrila took one look at it and went boggle-eyed.

"_Is that a plunger?!_" She squawked.

"Later!" Ignitia rebuked. "Run faster!"

Glowing pink light shrouded Razoruk's shadow as he leaped off the flight and sprinted into an ornate archway ahead. Another shrill yip from a very feminine voice echoed down the hall, almost drowned out by Ignitia and Cyrila as their heavy forms landed past the stairs with deep thuds. The ground trembled when the Fallen's armored heels pounded down behind them.

"My Queen! Are you hurt? Are you well? Why aren't you on your throne?" Razoruk babbled, his torrent of worries pitching.

"_Oh-no-! W-Wait-? T-Tali'?! Tali' where did you go, what's happening?!_"

In the center of the chamber stood the marble-rimmed Vision Pool itself, and standing on her hinds, clenching its top and dipping her head inside was a dragon of greens and reds with eight silvery horns.

"_Come back!_" Lilith cried into the swirling magicks of the Pool, her horrified face lit in a pink starkness from the glow. "…O-Oh no… _Oh no…_"

"My Queen?" Razoruk's ghostly voice trailed.

Lilith yelped again and spun around defensively, her chest scutes pumping as her heart's beating thudded in her throat.

"Razoruk?" Lilith gasped. "-W-What are you doing in here? I wasn't expecting you!"

Lilith noticed the Guardians, Spyra, and the strange armored being standing among them. A third yip louder than the last cracked the still air sharply and sent her off the ground by almost two feet.

"_Who are all of you?! C-Cyrila? Lady Cyrila? A-And Lady Ignitia, and-_" Lilith's face slowly dawned in wonder as her eyes settled on Spyra, who herself, edged a lower-lid, disturbed from the sudden, and rather creepy interest.

"…It's rude to stare, yeah?" Spyra coughed into her paw.

"The Purple Dragon." Lilith breathed. "The same who saved my people…"

"That was a team effort, baby." Spyra bumped her hip into the Fallen's leg. He waved at the queen sheepishly.

"Hello."

"Is that the alien that everyone is saying fell from the sky?" Lilith blinked. "The _Fallen,_ yes?"

"Huh," He put his hands on his hips and nodded with satisfaction. "at least somebody has a polite greeting for me today. Pleasure to meet you, Queen Lilith, might I say, your curvaceousness is as intoxicating as the lovely aroma coming off your scales. I'd be down to mine your gold any day."

"Oh my god." Cyrila gave him a disgusted look.

Ignitia raggedly cleared her throat when a small trail of giggles started to creep out of her snout. She blushed tomato-red and scratched at her snout.

Interestingly, no retort, scalding or reprimanding left her.

"Told ya' he's cute." Spyra winked.

"…I-I…" Ignitia stammered, squeezing her thighs together. "… _O-Oh my._"

"What has happened, my Queen?" Razoruk bowed lowly. "What was wrong with the Pool?"

"…Er nothing." Lilith gave a fake smile. "-Nothing was wrong at all, I was just… eh… _checking it._ You know, to see if it was… working correctly. _Yes._"

Razoruk blinked a few times at her stupidly, but ultimately let it go.

"…Of course, my lady, but… what of the ritual? The danger?"

"-Taken care of!" Lilith's expression sharply plummeted when the elder's face bloomed in disbelieving shock. "_-I-I mean- s-s-semi,_ semi-taken-care-of. I'm working on it… Uh, Lady Cyrila! It's good to see you again! You are unharmed."

"Yes, a timely intervention was necessary and executed by competent souls." Cyrila shook her head to clear it, glancing at the Fallen. "I've returned to assist you, as was promised."

"And what of Lady Volteera?"

Ignitia's blush faded, and a terribly grim look populated her face as her wings and tail drooped.

"…I see." Lilith muttered. She sat on her haunches, looking at the Pool over her shoulder with a mysterious feeling of worry before turning back to them. The poor dragoness was flustered beyond reprieve, Spyra could tell just by the flushing on her snout. "I'm certain your comrades will come to her aid as they did yours."

"With hope, of course." Cyrila huffed, ignoring Ignitia's angry glare.

"Well, it is a pleasure to finally stand in the company of the Purple Dragon, and the sky-warrior who saved my city." Lilith tentatively stepped forwards, placing herself before Spyra, where she graciously put a paw forward and bowed her crown. "I am Queen Lilith, Lady of the Realm of Vines. And you are?"

"…Uh, yeah, name's Spyra." Spyra scratched at an exposed fang awkwardly. "Wassup?"

Lilith cocked her head at the strange dialogue, but didn't pursue it. Next, she stepped over to the Fallen, examining him closely from helmet to toe.

"And you are the Fallen, correct?" Lilith sweetly said, looking up at him, seeing as she was just about the same height as Spyra.

"Yes ma'am." He nodded, his helm's links hissing as he removed the headwear. Lilith blinked at his exposed face as he cradled the helmet, and grinned at her.

"Curious." Lilith breathed, hiking on her toes to poke her nose around in the direction of his head. "What a strange suit of armor you possess, I'm afraid I've seen nothing like it before."

"It's-" He paused. "-not from around these parts. But it works."

"It must, given all I've heard about you two." Lilith nodded. "My soldiers say that you and Ms. Spyra practically stalled Urukal's army by yourselves."

Spyra giggled.

"_Ms._ Spyra!" She squealed under her breath. "Aw man, she's cute as fuck, can we keep her?"

"Can we?" The Fallen looked at Ignitia.

"I don't know what customary greetings exist for your people, Fallen, but given your stature, perhaps it isn't so indifferent from what the Cheetahs further east value?" Lilith balanced on three paws.

Then, she offered one up.

Even when Ignitia's eyes dilated and her heart dropped into her feet, she was too late to react.

"-_N-No _**wait-**_"_

"That works for me." The Fallen gripped Lilith's claw and gave it a slight bob. He winked. The reaction was almost instantaneous.

"-_U-Uhm r-right._" Lilith shivered suddenly, a strange look glazing over her eyes as she stole her forearm back and stepped away from him, a growing tremor overpowering her wings and her tail. The queen swallowed.

Her thighs.

There was something wrong with her thighs, and she didn't know what. And her hips. And her face.

Actually, _everything_ felt wrong right now. It felt tingly.

"Are you alright, your Majesty?" The Fallen asked. "You look a bit pale."

Ignitia groaned in defeat and sunk her face into a claw. Spyra was growling like a possessive hound, and even had her tail lashing around for effect.

"The hour is late, just know it isn't under _my_ watch such crimes held me from you this long, Lady Lilith." Cyrila moved around the human to give the queen an austere look. "Has the situation much evolved?"

"…U-Uhm, _no,_ no not… not in that sort of way. It's still the same, just getting worse." Lilith shook her head, trembling as she flinched away from the Fallen, who had suddenly become a lot more scary. She gulped. "My magic c-can only keep it in check so much."

"Magic?" The Fallen asked.

"There is something wrong with the plants in the Roseways." Cyrila nodded. "A building and dark energy, deep beneath the city. Malefora is eager to exacerbate anything she can to cause a cancer for Oversight. The city is still weak from the invasion."

"There's something growing in my plants, or, _under_ them, that isn't supposed to be there." Lilith swallowed again, keeping her distance as she unsteadily walked back to the stairwell, with Razoruk falling beside her. "You may have noticed, all throughout the castle, the vines, the flowers and the stems? Growing out every little niche and crack? They'll all connected to the Roseways underneath the city, and they have been for thousands of years since Oversight was first built around then Suntree."

"What's a sun-tree?" Spyra snorted.

"_This._" Lilith smiled, pointing with her tail as the party disgorged back into the throneroom behind the actual seat itself.

The blossom tree sprouting from the planter in the floor. Its branches somehow whispered just then, as if it had been caught in a phantom breeze. One of the petals softly flowed off, until it landed on Spyra's nose.

"_-Achoo~!_" –Fire shot out in a brief flash as the poor beastess was rocked onto her heels. She dug a talon in her nostril and sniffed angrily. "-_Agh,_ I don't even have allergies, man! What the hell…"

"How rare." Lilith breathed with delight. "The tree almost never sheds petals on a dragon so brazenly! The plants here must trust in you very much, Spyra!"

"Lore says that millennia ago, the western coast of the Dragon Realms was sundered under a terrible storm of ash from the Dark Continent." Ignitia explained, brushing another of the petals off her shoulder-fins. She pinched another between her talons and held it aloft to give it a sniff. "The sky turned black, the ocean stopped churning and became so clogged with dust and soot that it was said one could walk on its surface without fear of falling in. But there was fear for things much more potent than that. Birds and forest animals suffocated to death, the trees were burned down and the plants covering the region all died, wilting, and creating an immense black forest of despair. The Suntree was the first plant that ever grew back when the storm dissipated years later, and it's said that all plants and all life in the entire region stem from it, because its roots were the ones that delivered water to the landscape."

"So this tree is physically linked to almost every square-mile in the entire province?" The Fallen asked.

"In theory."

"It's very true!" Lilith nodded adamantly. "I should know! Both me and my mother are intuned with the Suntree. We can feel what it feels, and it cannot survive without the bond of love to a dragon who strives for the realm's betterment."

"That's-… That's beautiful." Spyra trailed. Suddenly, she scrunched up her face, and a quick, sharp fart erupted from under her tail. The Guardians scattered with disgusted squeals, and the Fallen put his helmet back on.

"Damn it." He glared down at her- trying to hide that he was half-laughing –and of course, failing.

"Sorry, I couldn't hold it." Spyra wheezed, rocking as the chuckle-hour took its toll. "_You should see all your faces~._"

"She's disrespectful, she has a poor vocabulary," Cyrila listed as she pinched her snout. "-and a poor _diet._ Honestly, Ignitia how far would you have let this hatchling plummet before intervening?"

"I _was_ intervening!" Ignitia cried. "She just… doesn't want to listen to me, ever."

"I thought you learned _something_ of a matriarch's calling with all those years at the Temple."

"Oh please, Cyrila, this coming from the dragon whose mother couldn't be bothered with knowledge of her whereabouts even _before_ she forgot her own name? Touche."

"Forgetting the gas and mommy-issues." The Fallen held his hands up. "How do we fix what's happening in the Roseways? The tree's being… what?"

"Poisoned!" Lilith cried, her jaw trembling as she gazed at the Suntree lovingly. "Oh that terrible witch has done something, sprouted something horrible underneath this city, and the Suntree is being poisoned. I've only been able to keep it at bay through my presence and some wards, but it accelerated so rapidly when I departed with Razoruk and the rest of the houseguard to try and-"

At this, the Queen's voice cracked and she shut her mouth, looking at Razoruk with pained eyes.

"-…Lady Terradora thinks I'm a coward. Well, she's probably right. I emerged to push Urukal's Orcs from the gates the first time, before Ladies Volteera and Cyrila arrived. I pushed them back _once._ A-And I lost everyone except Razoruk. Oh, dear Razoruk… I'm so sorry."

"You have nothing to fault yourself over." Razoruk stoically grunted, but even the Fallen could detect his composure wavering. "They died well. I'll remember them all for what they were: heroes, and nothing less."

"So that's what happened to your wing." Spyra said.

"Yes." Razoruk doted on the wilted, deformed stump over his scapula. "An OgreOrc, it knocked me down… and it… it brought its mace around and…"

"I pulled him to safety myself." Lilith sighed, using a thumb-talon to wipe away the beginning of a tear. "P-Pleas excuse me, but I haven't been ha_ving a good l-last few days-_"

The Queen sank onto her haunches, quiet sobs stealing away anything more she had to say.

"Jeez', you people cry a lot." Spyra whispered at Ignitia. The Guardian frowned and nudged her with a foot.

"Her mother, the previous Queen, only died a few months ago." She hissed. "The Royal Houseguard of Crownhorn are personal friends of each monarch they serve, they're claw-picked, each and every one of them. Last I remember, they numbered _thirty-two._ Lilith has lost thirty-one friends and her only parent, and her city has been ransacked, give her some space, please!"

"I'm sorry for your loss." The Fallen stuped a knee, leaning over the crying queen. He wanted to put a hand on her scaly shoulder, but that damage had already been done, and he didn't think now was a good time to '_up the dosage' _–per-say. "I know how that feels. I've lost more people than I can count."

"H-How do you put up with it?" Lilith sniffled.

"I don't." He muttered, huffing as he looked back at the pink Suntree.

One of the petals fluttered down from the full branches, turning and corkscrewing like a little mill propeller.

When he reached a palm out to take it, the petal swerved, and then hovered right over his plated palm for all of a second. He clasped his fingers, and the petal slipped deftly past his thumb, where it ended its sole journey onto the floor beside his knee.

The Fallen frowned deeply.

The message hurt, but he understood it. He rose and started walking towards the tree.

"We have to kill whatever is poisoning the tree. These Roseways, how do we get to them?"

"Well," Razoruk glared at Ignitia, nodding to the little keyring hanging off her equipment hipsash. "you're the keymaster now, milady."

"Right." Ignitia took the ring in her teeth and gazed expectantly at Lilith. "Where lies the gateway, you Majesty?"

"…T-The tree." Lilith sniffled, pointing at the thick trunk sprouting from the floor. "-B-Behind it…"

"_Holy shit._"

Spyra's jaw dropped as she finished wandering past the tree's flank. She was staring at something in the bark, gesturing quickly for the others to look.

"You have to see this."

The tree's flesh yawned into a naturally occurring arch made of twisting root-flesh and petal-ridden brambles. Beyond it, worming into the soft, mulchy ground was a cavernous tunnelway, just barely big enough for a single dragon to tuck their wings and fit through.

The tunnel's walls and ceiling were made of so many interconnected vines that they resembled sheets of finely woven black hair. Each vine-strand was speckled with tiny glowing green ulcers and veins, and each time the whole assortment pulsed, the waves of neon light traveled from the interior throat of the causeway all the way up to the surface.

A gust of wind sighed out of the tree's guts and blew in their faces. It smelt of wet soil and honeydew, and a whole cluster of pink petals detached from the blossom clusters above to fall around them like snowflakes.

"Huh," Spyra raised a brow. "who knew the friggin' tree had an asshole and that we have to climb into it? Not me."

"It snakes around the root-cluster." The Fallen said, angling himself to try and look deeper inside the tunnel. It twisted sharply to the left and continued down in a spiral. The whole tree creaked eerily and sighed again, making his suit's sensors blare with panicked mania. "I'll always volunteer point, but if anyone else wants it…"

"I ain't sticking my nose in that thing first." Spyra nudged him with her horns. "Get goin', space-man."

"You'll need the key, probably." Ignitia let him take the ring out of her mouth. She brushed her tail over the human's plating down his back, eyes wandering down the synthetics protecting his body. "I know you'll be careful, but just hear it from me too? I don't know what Spyra would do if… well, something _happened._"

"Just Spyra, huh?" He quietly smirked at her. The Fallen put a finger under her chin and actually got her to almost fall into him when he brushed it backward. "Alright, the role of first-guy-to-die-to-killer-plant-assholes is filled. Let's get going."

* * *

{🐉}


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